Mixed Race Studies

American Identities: California Short Stories of Multiple Ancestries

Xlibris Press
2008
263 Pages
ISBN: 1-4363-7705-6 (Trade Paperback 6×9)
ISBN13: 978-1-4363-7705-8 (Trade Paperback 6×9)

Eliud Martínez, Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature
University of California, Riverside

In many parts of the country, especially in California, when one passes by a school or strolls across a college or university campus, it is inescapable to the eye that the American student population looks very different from that before the seventies. Young people today are accustomed to seeing people from many ancestral backgrounds. In classrooms, at schools, colleges and universities; at shopping malls, weddings and other social gatherings, young people are aware that they are living in an increasingly multicultural America.

These then, are the voices and stories of today’s young Americans. Diverse, by turns uplifting, insightful, illuminating and heart-warming or heartbreaking, the stories give us moving portrayals of the young authors and their families, mothers and fathers. Some offer shocking depictions of military brutality and political violence. Others recover family stories and make touching tributes to earlier generations. Some stories help us to see how young people perceive themselves and their identities when they are offspring of mothers and fathers from other lands or of different cultures.

The young writers included in this anthology, or their parents and ancestors, come from Egypt, Ethiopia, Korea, China, Japan, Cambodia, Taiwan, India; from East Los Angeles, El Salvador, Mexico, Honduras, Vietnam, Italy, Denmark, the Philippines, Cuba, and other places. Generational differences are inevitable between immigrant parents and their children, who are either American-born or grow up in America. The differences shape many attitudes to the ancestral cultures, customs, language and ways of life. The stories remind us of why some people came to America, of what they left behind, and what persists in ancestral forms adapted to American ways.

The stories provide telling evidence that collectively, there are many varieties of American identity among children of immigrants and their parents from other lands. These California stories tell of young lives that have been shaped by ancestry, time and place, national background, personal and generational experiences, geography, and by American social and immigrant history, conditions in their ancestral lands and lingering perceptions of race.

Many immigrants come in search of a better life or in pursuit of the American dream. Some Americanized children of immigrants struggle self-consciously to fit in. Their experiences invite dramatic literary expression. In two of the most powerful stories in this anthology, Jan Ballesteros and Thien Hoang exorcise their extreme pain, self-consciousness and struggle for acceptance.
In high school Ballesteros is repeatedly humiliated in his classes by four bullies who ridicule his Filipino appearance and his spoken accent. Extremely vulnerable, Ballesteros is perplexed because the bullies are all half-Filipino. In Hoang’s case, he is self-conscious about the Chinese reflection that looks out at him from the mirror. By writing their stories these two vulnerable young men come to terms with being American, and at the same time with being Filipino and Chinese, respectively.

More so than in Ballesteros and Hoang’s case a heightened consciousness of color and the desire to look American leads the Vietnamese mother in Kim Bui’s story—“Asian Eyes Westernized”—to change the shape of her eyes surgically. Ironically, the young author points out, the woman who in Vietnam used to work in the sun daily, here In America, she avoids being out in the sun, and resorts to skin whiteners. Kim Bui is struck by her mother’s advice to be proud of being Vietnamese, but to look American. In their stories Megan E. Chao, Chariya Heang, and Neha Pandey highlight their views of young womanhood in America when parents observe or desire to observe the tradition of arranged marriages. Conflicting points of view and parental cultural norms affect young women. Moving self-portrayals, characterized by thoughtful introspection and injections of irony and humor, attest to their dilemmas.

The Stories in this anthology are important for American education, I believe, so that young people can see themselves in these portrayals. In addition to the moving value of the stories the storytelling is of a high caliber. The storytelling is based on knowledge of ancestral traditions and customs, languages, cultural and social history, geography, family memorabilia, immigration documents, old photographs and family correspondence, materials and family stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. In addition to these sources, the young authors interviewed mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and grandparents, and in some cases in languages other than English, all to the young writers’ credit…. [T]he titles of the stories tellingly identify major themes, experiences, and issues that invited and received dramatic literary expression. These stories are valuable repositories of human experiences shared by many young people today. These then, are the stories and voices of young Americans. One may safely predict that the experiences of which these young people have written so candidly, and in many cases eloquently, will resonate with other people and invite thoughtful self-awareness and self-understanding, a deeper appreciation for the richness of the many immigrant cultures of America, and an enhanced understanding of people of multiple ancestries.

And according to the prospectus…

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a productive, illuminating and prolific body of scholarly research and creative expression in all the arts. Much of that enterprise was devoted to the most admirable task of historiography—the reinterpretation of the past and the rewriting of American history.

These stories add artistic dimensions to American social and immigrant history, and complement the scholarly research and literary expression of individual groups. The subject matter, the themes, cultural issues and the very human drama of young lives, as depicted in these stories, are timely. Also, because many of the stories address the longing to belong, which historically, was denied to some American groups in the past, they illustrate how emotionally complex the task continues to be for vulnerable young people from many countries…. In the case of U.S. minority groups—as African Americans, Chicanos, Asian- and Native Americans were once designated—that past denial resulted in the retroactive recovery of our rich intellectual and cultural histories, creative and artistic roots, our arts, heritages and ancestries.

Imaginative and creative expression in the arts dramatizes scholarship in history and the social sciences…. Personal, emotional, direct and down to earth, these stories drive home the psychological and emotional impact of feeling different with a directness and immediacy that scholarly works can only approximate. As such, the anthology also complements numerous scholarly works about bi-racial, multi-racial and mixed-race people.

To read an excerpt, click here.

Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South

University of Georgia Press
2005-03-28
60 pages
Illustrated, Trim size: 5.5 x 8.25
ISBN: 978-0-8203-2731-0

Theda Perdue, Atlanta Distinguished Term Professor of Southern Culture
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

On the southern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European men—including traders, soldiers, and government agents—sometimes married Native women. Children of these unions were known by whites as “half-breeds.” The Indian societies into which they were born, however, had no corresponding concepts of race or “blood.” Moreover, counter to European customs and laws, Native lineage was traced through the mother only. No familial status or rights stemmed from the father.

“Mixed Blood” Indians looks at a fascinating array of such birth- and kin-related issues as they were alternately misunderstood and astutely exploited by both Native and European cultures. Theda Perdue discusses the assimilation of non-Indians into Native societies, their descendants’ participation in tribal life, and the white cultural assumptions conveyed in the designation “mixed blood.” In addition to unions between European men and Native women, Perdue also considers the special cases arising from the presence of white women and African men and women in Indian society.

From the colonial through the early national era, “mixed bloods” were often in the middle of struggles between white expansionism and Native cultural survival. That these “half-breeds” often resisted appeals to their “civilized” blood helped foster an enduring image of Natives as fickle allies of white politicians, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. “Mixed Blood” Indians rereads a number of early writings to show us the Native outlook on these misperceptions and to make clear that race is too simple a measure of their—or any peoples’—motives.

IndiVisible – African-Native American Lives in the Americas

National Museum of the American Indian
4th Street and Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, DC
2009-11-09 through 2010-05-31

Comanche family, early 1900s Here is a family from the Comanche Nation located in southwestern Oklahoma. The elder man in Comanche traditional clothing is Ta-Ten-e-quer. His wife, Ta-Tat-ty, also wears Comanche clothing. Their niece (center) is Wife-per, also known as Frances E. Wright. Her father was a Buffalo Soldier (an African American cavalryman) who deserted and married into the Comanches. Henry (center left) and Lorenzano (center right) are the sons of Frances, who married an African American man. Courtesy Sam DeVenney

Within the fabric of American identity is woven a story that has long been invisible—the lives and experiences of people who share African American and Native American ancestry.

African and Native peoples came together in the Americas. Over centuries, African Americans and Native Americans created shared histories, communities, families, and ways of life. Prejudice, laws, and twists of history have often divided them from others, yet African-Native American people were united in the struggle against slavery and dispossession, and then for self-determination and freedom.

For African-Native Americans, their double heritage is truly indivisible.

The exhibition IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas is a collaboration between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service (SITES).

Critical Whiteness Studies Symposium: Call for Papers

Critical Whiteness Studies Symposium
University of Iowa
2010-09-23 through 2010-09-24
Abstract Deadline: 2010-03-12

Keynote Speakers:

David Roediger, Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Karyn McKinney, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Education, Human Development, & Social Sciences
Penn State University, Altoona

Abstract deadline March 12, 2010.

This two-day symposium examines the social, cultural and historical production of whiteness, particularly in the age of Obama. The symposium takes up a critical race theory paradigm to engage whiteness and whiteness studies in conversation with the humanities and social sciences. Questions of importance include: How can we interrogate and employ whiteness studies in ways that do not re-center or reify whiteness? Should whiteness studies take an increasingly critical stand in the wake of an Obama Presidency? In other words, how do we maintain a focus on social justice in the face of complacency around institutionalized oppression? We are particularly interested in engaging these and other questions about whiteness in an historical context, thinking through the particular shapes of whiteness, privilege and oppression in the contemporary moment while debunking the ideological lure of a “postracial” America.

We seek abstract submissions that address but are not limited to:

• Whiteness and sexualities
• Whiteness, class and labor struggle
• Whiteness, Orientalism and the Occidental Gaze
• Social movements
• Postracism, postfeminism and post-identity formations
• Homonormativity
• American exceptionalism and Homonationalism
• Mixed race whiteness and white ethnicity
• Whiteness, food culture and “eating the Other”
• Whiteness and regionalism; Midwestern critical whiteness
• Neoliberalism, whiteness and global capitalism
• Representing and consuming whiteness (e.g., visually, aurally, performatively)
• Whiteness and digital culture
• Whiteness, critical pedagogies and the classroom

Panel submissions, as well as submissions of individual papers and creative performances are welcome.

Critical Whiteness Studies is organized by the Project On Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI) at the University of Iowa. The symposium will consist of two public lectures featuring David Roediger and Karyn McKinney, performances, visual installations and scholarly panels that critically examine whiteness. POROI is an interdisciplinary program dedicated to the exploration of how scholarship and professional discourses are conducted through argument, how paradigms of knowledge are sensitive to social-political contexts, and how the presentation of scholarly and professional findings involve the recognition and negotiation of audiences.

Please submit abstracts for papers, panels, or roundtables, accompanied by one-page vitas. Include any AV needs you may have. Submit materials by March 12, 2010.

2010 African American Studies Symposium

University of Texas at San Antonio
2010-04-16

The 3rd annual African American Studies Symposium is a one-day conference Friday, April 16, 2010, at the University of Texas at San Antonio. This year, the theme is ‘Politics and Black Popular Culture.’ We especially encourage papers on language, music, hair, art, film, Black popular literature, celebrities (e.g., Oprah, Tiger Woods, Wanda Sikes), technology, border crossing, health, post-race/mixed-race identities, and political races (e.g., Texas Governor’s race, Houston Mayoral race, 2008 Presidential election). Each talk is allotted 20 minutes per session with an additional 30 minutes for discussion of the panel’s papers.

Pre-registration required, but no registration fee.

The Myth of the Human Races

Michigan State University Press
December 1997
210 pages
6.00″ x 9.00″
Notes, bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN 10: 0-87013-439-6; ISBN 13: 978-0-87013-439-5

Alain F. Corcos, Professor Emeritus of Botany
Michigan State University

The idea that human races exist is a socially constructed myth that has no grounding in science. Regardless of skin, hair, or eye color, stature or physiognomy, we are all of one species. Nonetheless, scientists, social scientists, and pseudo-scientists have, for three centuries, tried vainly to prove that distinctive and separate “races” of humanity exist. These protagonists of race theory have based their flawed research on one or more of five specious assumptions:

• humanity can be classified into groups using identifiable physical characteristics
• human characteristics are transmitted “through the blood,”
• distinct human physical characteristics are inherited together,
• physical features can be linked to human behavior,
• human groups or “races” are by their very nature unequal and, therefore, they can be ranked in order of intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority.

The Myth of Human Races systematically dispels these fallacies and unravels the web of flawed research that has been woven to demonstrate the superiority of one group of people over another.

Q&A With Researchers: Associate Professor Manying Ip

asia:nz online
Asia New Zealand Foundation

Associate Professor Manying Ip
Asia:NZ Trustee; Associate Professor of Chinese, School of Asian Studies, University of Auckland

Manying Ip came to New Zealand in 1974 from Hong Kong where her family lived for five generations. With her strong classical Chinese education at home and colonial English education at shool, she grew up sharply aware of the challenges of being cross-cultural.

Her interest in Maori-Chinese interactions started from the mid 1980s when she conducted extensive qualitative interviews among the pioneering Chinese families, which grew ever stronger with the immigration and ethnic identity debates

Manying is Associate Professor in Asian Studies at The University of Auckland and the author of several critically acclaimed books on Chinese in New Zealand. These include: Aliens At My Table: Asians as New Zealanders See Them (Penguin, 2005), Unfolding Identity, Evolving Identity: The Chinese in New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2003) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on issues pertaining to recent Asian immigrants. Dr Ip’s most recent book Being Maori-Chinese: Mixed Identities (Auckland University Press, 2008) uses extensive interviews with seven different families of mixed Chinese-Maori descent to explore both historical and contemporary relations between Maori and Chinese, a subject which has not been given serious extended study before. Her edited volume The Dragon and The Taniwha: Maori and Chinese in New Zealand will be published in April 2009, investigating the complex social fabric of New Zealand and offering a nuanced study of ancient and contemporary shared identities amongst two significant ethnic minority groups.

Dr Ip is a respected advocate for Chinese communities living in New Zealand. She was awarded a Suffrage Centennial Medal in 1993 and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1996.  In 2004 she co-directed New Faces Old Fears, a television documentary exploring racism, multiculturalism and social cohesion in New Zealand. In late 2008, she was elected a Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of Humanities (FNZAH) in recognition of her distinction in research and the advancement of the humanities.

1. Your most recent publication Being Maori–Chinese: Mixed Identities explores the historical and contemporary significance of the relationship between Maori and Chinese New Zealanders.  How did you become interested in this topic and what were some of the most interesting findings?

Ever since I started conducting oral interviews on the early days of Chinese New Zealanders, I heard my interviewees mentioning their relationship with Maori people: as co-workers in the market gardens, as neighbours  and workmates. Quite often they mentioned the existence of mixed Maori-Chinese families because early Chinese men came to New Zealand as bachelors and many of them formed relationships with Maori women…

Read the entire interview here.

Drawing Battle Lines

Sarah Lawrence College Magazine
Spring 2003: Who Are You

Catherine McKinley[-Davis] was one of only a few thousand African-American and biracial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, her consciousness grew as she did. Her very identity—composed both of the whiteness and blackness mixed in her genes, and of the whiteness of her adoptive parents—began to tear her apart, and she eventually embarked on a quest to find her birth parents and move toward self-acceptance. In this excerpt from “The Book of Sarahs”, her new memoir, McKinley pinpoints a crucial moment: that time when her home became the field on which the combats of race, of identity, of being the outsider, began to be fought in earnest.

With my parents’ move to Vermont, it seemed as though a very final, pronounced line had been drawn between us. It was different from the boundaries I had drawn in the past, acting against the surety that they would still be standing right there no matter how firm I drew and redrew the battle lines.

In Attleboro, those lines were drawn like this: In our house, I built a haven for myself, constructing my bedroom the way I thought it would have been if I had grown up in a Black family. My shelves were filled with Black books, replacing the artifacts of a former self—the dolls from my grandmother’s travels, the complete Laura Ingalls Wilder boxed library, the collections of Scottish verse, the Peterson’s guides to wildflowers and the seashore. I stowed them in the crawl space under the eaves of the house and moved my mother’s copies of The Black Child: A Parent’s Guide, the SNCC freedom movement songbooks, Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman and The Slave, the row of James Baldwin paperbacks, and Stokely Carmichael and James Hamilton’s Black Power out from between the Rachel Carson and Thoreau and Henry Beston books, the trail guides, and my father’s engineering manuals in the den. I covered my walls with clippings from Essence and Ebony and turned up the dial on the “civil rights station” (read: Black radio, aired only on late night and Sunday slots, picked up from the Boston airways) to let everyone know who was living there. And I put a ban on my room. My father, who was my ally, if only for his silence and quiet amusement at my lobbies against the family, was the only one allowed in, and only so that he could tend the African violets he grew on shelves he built into my bedroom windows. I liked the flowers; they were African, despite how suspicious they seemed to me, sitting in the living room of every old white lady in town…

Read the entire article here.

Mestizaje Upside-Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia

University of Pittsburgh Press
May 2004
240 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 9780822942276

Javier C. Sanjinés, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies
University of Michigan

Mestizaje refers to the process of cultural, ethnic, and racial mixture that is part of cultural identity in Latin America. Through a careful study of fiction, political essays, and visual art, this book defines the meaning of mestizaje in the context of the emergence of a modern national and artistic identity in late-19th- and early 20th-century Bolivia.

A Letter to My Father: Growing up Filipina and American

University of Oklahoma Press
2008
184 pages
5.5″ x 8.5″ x 0″
8 b&w illustrations, 2 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8061-3909-8

Helen Madamba Mossman

Going from the jungles of the wartime Philippines to the schoolyards of northwestern Oklahoma is no easy transition. For one twelve-year-old girl, it meant distance not only across the globe but also within her own family.

Born to a Filipino father and an American mother, Helen Madamba experienced terrifying circumstances at a young age. During World War II, her father, Jorge, fought as an American soldier in his native Philippines, and his family camped in jungles and slept in caves for more than two years to evade capture by the Japanese. But once the family relocated to Woodward, Oklahoma, young Helen faced a different kind of struggle.

Here Mossman tells of her efforts to repudiate her Asian roots so she could fit into American mainstream culture—and her later efforts to come to terms with her identity during the tumultuous 1960s. As she recounts her father’s wartime exploits and gains an appreciation of his life, she learns to rejoice in her biracial and multicultural heritage.

Written with the skill of a gifted storyteller and graced with photos that capture both of Helen’s worlds, A Letter to My Father is a poignant story that will resonate with anyone familiar with the struggle to reconcile past and present identities.