Mixed Race Studies

Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor’s race

The Los Angeles Times
2013-01-02

Michael Finnegan

Working a recent breakfast gathering of business owners in Northridge, Los Angeles mayoral contender Eric Garcetti introduced himself in Hindi when a Sikh businessman approached.

A few hours later, Garcetti donned a colorful Peruvian headpiece with ear flaps as he spoke Spanish with immigrants on the steps of City Hall, part of a show of solidarity for designating a stretch of Hollywood’s Vine Street as “Peru Village.”

After lunch, Garcetti joined rabbis at a City Hall menorah lighting. Wearing a yarmulke, the Hollywood-area councilman sang Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, English and Spanish. “Toda la familia,” Garcetti said as the group huddled for a photo.

A top contender to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Garcetti prides himself on his ease with the city’s diverse cultures. He sees his mixed ancestry (“I have an Italian last name, and I’m half Mexican and half Jewish,” he says) as a powerful part of his appeal in a city where voters for decades have split along racial and ethnic lines in mayoral elections…

Read the entire article here.

Review: Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Southern California Quarterly
Volume 94, Number 4 (Winter 2012)
pages 492-494
DOI: 10.1525/scq.2012.94.4.492

Alex Jacoby

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in Sun Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 256 pp.)

In the last decade there lias been an increased recognition of the need for multiethnic studies to letter understand the processes of racialization and community formation beyond a simplistic binary. Important works by Peggy Pascoe, Moon-Kie Jung, Scott Kurashige, Laura Pulido, Mark Wild, and others have contributed innovative research, methodological approaches, and theoretical ideas to facilitate this comparative analysis. Joining this wealth of new scholarship is Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, a social history of the interplay and imbrication of Mexican and Filipino communities in San Diego during the first half of the twentieth century. The author, Rudy Guevarra Jr., is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific Studies at Arizona State University, and this monograph is an extension of his dissertation project. He argues that, as a reaction to being marginalized and facing segregation, both ethnic groups…

Read or purchase the review here.

How “Commonsense” Notions of Race, Class and Gender Infiltrate Families Formed across the Color Line

Sociology Mind
Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2012)
pages 75-69
ISSN Print: 2160-083X
ISSN Online: 2160-0848
DOI: 10.4236/sm.2012.21010

Eileen T. Walsh, Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Fullerton

This research presents data from in-depth interviews of sixty adults in Southern California who have formed families across the black/white color line. In a societal context where normative family formation remains mono-racial, many adults in multiracial families manage their social performances to mitigate the stigma associated with their unusual family pattern or to challenge social expectations associated with race, class, and gender. Their stories reveal how they deploy strategic exaggerations of gender and stereotypes of social class in their day to day lives. These deployments operate to manage social interactions when confronting commonsense expectations about what it means to be a man or woman who trespasses the color line in family formation.

Read the entire article here.

Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 108
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Cornet Room (Sheraton New Orleans)

Chair: Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles

Papers:

• “‘I Do Not Know at Times What To Do, Everything Turns Out Wrong’: Mixed Children Negotiating Anglo and Californio Worlds in Post-Conquest California” / Erika Perez, Loyola Marymount University
• “Major E. C. Watkins’ Frustrating Adventure: Defining Family in the Post-Civil War North American West” / Anne Hyde, Colorado College
• “The Man Who Talks Not: John L. Clarke and the Politics of Mixed-Race Identity in Montana, 1900–50” / Andrew R. Graybill, Southern Methodist University

Comments: Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The 2000 U.S. census revealed that an increasing number of Americans identified themselves as multi-racial and the recent 2010 census indicates the same trend. President Barak Obama’s 2008 election also called into question debates about multi-racial identities and the validity of racial categories given the long history of intimate mixing in the United States. This panel attempts to historically situate processes of identity-formation by people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in North America, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that some mixed-race and multi-ethnic individuals and families struggled against mainstream racial discourses that discouraged any acceptance of complex identities. Some mixed individuals faced pressures to select and perform one racial identity in public and even within their communities and families. However, the research of this panel demonstrates that individual identities remained contested, negotiated, and in some cases fluid, especially in the American west where racial paradigms extended beyond black and white to include Native Americans and Mexicans in the evolution of racial categories and ideologies.

The first paper by Erika Perez evaluates how the offspring of Spanish-Mexican and European ancestry struggled to find their niche in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of California in the wake of the Gold Rush. Mixed offspring soon discovered that their options for social mobility were shaped largely by gender, class, education and racial identity, and despite the presence of a European or Anglo-American father, this did not necessarily guarantee mixed offspring success in a changing social climate in American California. While mixed girls experienced increasing social and marriage options in California society, their brothers expressed fear and frustration that they would never attain the success of the previous generation. Anne Hyde’s paper demonstrates how U.S. bureaucrats and policy-makers of Indian affairs attempted to impose their own concepts of gender and the nuclear family upon Native American communities towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, Hyde shows that these bureaucratic efforts were contested by indigenous-influenced meanings of family and kinship, thereby contributing to confusion about racial categories, legal identities, and legitimacy in Indian country. Finally, Andrew Graybill’s paper tells the story of one man, John L. Clarke, a Montana artist, who held fast and firm to an Indian identity throughout his life and in his art despite the potential for him to lay claim to some white privilege because of his marriage and mixed heritage. Although other members of Clarke’s family claimed an “in-between” identity, affirming both their Indian and European roots, he remained determined to express himself as an Indian. As this abstract makes clear, all of these papers touch upon identity-formation and developing ideas of race in the North American borderlands and how this process was not always geared towards assimilation but entailed great complexity and negotiation among mixed individuals and even members of the same family. Members interested in racial identities, borderland studies, and the American West will find this panel useful.

The Color of Change: Voting Rights in the 21st Century and the California Voting Rights Act

Harvard Latino Law Review
Volume 15 (2012)
pages 184-231

Joanna E. Cuevas Ingram
University of California, Davis

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 AND THE CALIFORNIA VOTING RIGHTS ACT
• II. U.S. SUPREME COURT DECISIONS ON FEDERAL VRA STANDARDS
  • A. Heightened Burdens of Proof for Potential Plaintiffs
  • B. Post-Racial Penumbras
  • C. The Politics of Containment: Post-Racial Opposition to Voting Rights Remedies
  • D. The Full Spectrum of Voter Discrimination: “Multiracial” Identities and Multiethnic Members of Protected Voting Rights Classes
• III. FEDERAL VRA STANDARDS: CIRCUIT COURT DECISIONS ADDRESSING MULTIETHNIC/MULTILINGUAL COALITIONS
  • A. The Majority View: Recognition of Coalition Plaintiffs
  • B. The Minority View: Non-Recognition of Coalition Plaintiffs
• IV. MULTIETHNIC/MULTILINGUAL COALITIONS IN CALIFORNIA AND THE CVRA
  • A. Multiethnic/Multilingual Coalition Voting Blocs in California
  • B. Impediments and Rewards for Compliance
• V. CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.”

— César Chávez, Address to the Commonwealth Club of California (November 9, 1984).

In the twenty-first century, we have witnessed the rise of a post-racial national political narrative, particularly as the population in the United States has become increasingly multilingual and multiethnic. This narrative has been fashionably employed by cultural critics, media personalities, elected officials, attorneys, and even courts in an attempt to check the unprecedented surge in the political power of the diverse demographic, allowing these public figures and institutions to gloss over statistically sound cases of voter disenfranchisement in an attempt to dilute or contain what are fast becoming “minority-majority” voting districts.  Under Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) of 1965, illegal vote dilution can be found where an electoral standard, practice, or procedure results in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or color, including those instances where it can be demonstrated that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the state or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a protected class of citizens under the VRA…

…D. The Full Spectrum of Voter Discrimination: “Multiracial” Identities and Multiethnic Members of Protected Voting Rights Classes

Opponents of minority coalition claims under Section 2 seem to make another secondary, and offensive, intimation: the idea that multiracial identity itself could frustrate the purpose and practical application of the VRA.

This argument rings hollow after the Bartlett decision, however, particularly given the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau had established clear guidelines in 2000 for data interpretation based on responses that included one or more, two or more, and four or more race/ethnicity selections. Over the last decade, the Census Bureau has developed some incredibly advanced digital statistics on racial demographics by census tract The Bureau continues to maintain relatively accurate analyses of voting patterns and polls for individual groups as well as aggregate groups; data that is readily available online to any inquiring mind.

While more young Americans today do identify as multiethnic, multiracial, or mixed race, self-identification alone does not mean that individuals who so identify believe that they live in a presently post-racial society, nor does it mean that multiethnic or multicultural individuals do not experience any discriminatory treatment. Furthermore, nor does it signify that they are no longer considered members of a protected class or minority group. In fact, many individuals who identify as multiethnic and multiracial speak to the diversity of experiences each person may encounter in equal access to employment, education, housing, health care, insurance, business loans, and other social indicators of discrimination, including access to the political franchise. Increasingly, several scholars who identify as multiethnic and multiracial have worked to craft a discourse of resistance, encouraging individuals, regardless of how they identify, to embrace the complexity of their experiences and heritage by challenging the dominant social, cultural, and political structures that perpetuate white supremacy and racial segregation.

Further, opponents’ arguments that the 2000 Census would complicate litigation projections for local jurisdictions ring hollow; the standards set forth by the Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) in March 2000 established a coherent framework for the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) in evaluating claims for the purpose of the Voting Rights Act and other remedies designed to address both systemic racial discrimination and individual discriminatory treatment. The 2000 OMB standards, although arguably problematic in dealing with social constructs such as race, have sought to provide a clear framework to respond to systemic discrimination and to accommodate the groundbreaking transformation that the 2000 and 2010 Census have taken in allowing respondents to check more than one ethnicity/race. The rules set forth by the OMB and applied by the DOJ would in fact alleviate any perceived difficulties in meeting the Gingles requirements:

Pursuant to those rules, DOJ will allocate any multiple-race response in which “White” and one of the five other basic categories were checked to the minority race that was checked. Thus, the numbers for each minority race will consist of the total of (i) the single-race responses in which only that minority race was checked; and (ii) the multiple-race responses in which only that minority race and “White” were checked. DOJ will allocate the remaining multiple-race responses—those in which two or more minority races were checked, either along with “White” or without it—to a category called “Other Multiple-Race.” If it finds that a jurisdiction’s “Other Multiple-Race” category contains a significant number of responses that reflect a particular multiple-race combination, it will allocate those responses alternatively to each of the minority races in that combination.”

When it comes to the question of Hispanic or Latino identity, the DOJ has expressed its intention to continue to treat individuals who identify as Hispanic or Latino as members of a distinct minority group for the purpose of enforcing the Voting Rights Act. If the DOJ finds that a significant number of the individuals in the jurisdiction have identified as members of this ethnic category and one or more minority racial groups, it will allocate those responses alternatively to the Hispanic or Latino category and the minority race(s) checked. For example, if the DOJ finds that a significant number of responses checked both Hispanic or Latino and Black or African-American, it will allocate the first of those responses to the Hispanic or Latino category, the second to the Black or African-American category, and so on. While other scholars have confirmed that the DOJ will also have to use the OMB allocation rules in enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, they have also posited that the courts are not bound to follow the guidelines as established by the executive branch…

Read the entire article here.

The L.A. Scene: Teaching Race and Popular Music in the 1950s

Organization of American Historians Magazine of History
Volume 26, Issue 4
pages 17-20
DOI: 10.1093/oahmag/oas030

Luis Alvarez, Associate Professor of History
University of California, San Diego

In 1956, Little Julian Herrera had one of the biggest rhythm and blues hits of the year in Los Angeles. His soulful, doo-wop style ballad, “Lonely Lonely Nights,” turned Herrera into an overnight sensation. He was soon known across the city for spectacular live performances that later drew comparisons to a young James Brown. He became a teen idol and heartthrob among Mexican American girls on the Eastside. What many of his fans may not have known, however, was that Herrera was neither Mexican American nor from L.A. He was an East Hungarian Jew who had run away from his Massachusetts home at age eleven. His given name was Ezekiel, though his probation officer knew him as Ron Gregory. After hitchhiking to Southern California, he was taken in by a Mexican American family in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East L.A. and eventually took their surname as his own.

“Lonely Lonely Nights” was produced by the legendary Johnny Otis. Born the son of Greek immigrants in Vallejo, California, Otis came of musical age as a drummer and bandleader playing African American jazz and blues joints along Central Avenue in L.A. By the mid-1950s when he helped launch Little Julian Herrera into local stardom, Otis already was a formidable figure in the L.A. music scene who soon became known as the “Godfather of Rhythm and Blues.” He produced records, hosted radio and television programs, and organized dances and concerts. He was also regularly harassed by local authorities for creating and promoting music whose performers and audiences often crossed racial lines. Otis, in fact, considered himself “black by persuasion.” He once remarked, “Genetically, I’m pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community”. In a scenario emblematic of the racial diversity of L.A.’s 1950s…

Read or purchase the article here.

Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American community fading into history

The Washington Post
2012-08-13

Benjamin Gottlieb

Amelia Singh Netervala points to her mother’s chicken curry enchiladas as the best metaphor for her childhood.

Born to a Punjabi Sikh father and Mexican mother, her family was full of cultural contradictions: She went to church on Sundays with her mother and three siblings while her father waited outside in the family car. She would have langar — the daily Sikh communal meal — just once a year, when her father would embark on the five-hour journey from Phoenix to the nearest gurdwara in El Centro, a Californian border town in the Imperial Valley. Her clandestine conversations with her mother were done in Spanish, a language her father never mastered.

All the while Netervala never had any doubts about her identity.

“I’m proud of my Mexican heritage and mixed ethnicity,” said Netervala, who grew up on an alfalfa and cotton farm in Casa Grande, 50 miles south of Phoenix. “But if I had to choose, I would identify as being an Indian woman.”

Now in her mid-70s, Netervala is part of the nation’s thinning Punjabi-Mexican population, an identity forged out of historical necessity and made possible by uncanny cultural parallels…

Read the entire article here.

Rodney King juror: ‘My father was black’

Ventura County Star
Camarillo, California
2012-04-28

Gretchen Wenner, Staff Reporter

SQUAW VALLEY — Juror No. 8 from the Rodney King beating trial has always heard the 12-member panel described as either all white or as having no blacks.
 
Now, he wants the public to know that’s not the whole story: His father was a black man.
 
“Nobody’s ever guessed that I was black,” Henry King Jr. told The Star.
 
From the get-go, the media made a big thing about the jury having no blacks, said King, a 69-year-old retiree living in Fresno County.

“It made you feel like they didn’t think we could come out with a fair verdict because we were supposed to be an all-white jury,” he said…

…”There are a few things about me that people don’t know,” he initially said, then choked back tears before saying his father was black.
 
It’s something he didn’t share with other jurors during the trial and doesn’t recall sharing when they occasionally socialized afterward. Nor had he talked about it with a reporter.
 
“Forty years ago, you really didn’t say that you were part black,” said King. “Now, I’m proud of it.”
 
When he applied last year to be on the Fresno County Grand Jury, one of the first things he told them was that his father was black.
 
“They thought I was joking,” he said.
 
During interviews on the phone and at his home on 5 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, King shared family photos and thoughts on his background and the trial. Both of his parents have since died.
 
“I look pretty white,” said King, whose friends call him Hank. “If you looked at me, you wouldn’t know I had black blood in me.”
 
His eyes are blue; his skin is light.
 
King variously described himself as part black, as having black blood and occasionally as black or mixed-race.
 
“I don’t know if you would say mulatto or what,” he said at one point.
 
In his younger years, he didn’t often think about his racial background…

Read the entire article here.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Rutgers University Press
June 2012
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780813552835, ISBN: 0813552834
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780813552842, ISBN: 0813552842

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Associate Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy Guevarra traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast.

Through racially restrictive covenants and other forms of discrimination, both groups, regardless of their differences, were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own through family and kin networks, shared cultural practices, social organizations, and music and other forms of entertainment. They occupied the same living spaces, attended the same Catholic churches, and worked together creating labor cultures that reinforced their ties, often fostering marriages. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves.  Their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined, revealing the ways in which Mexicans and Filipinos interacted over generations to produce this distinct and instructive multiethnic experience. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.

“Teachable Moments”: The Use of Child-Centered Arguments in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

California Law Review
Volume 98, Issue 1 (February 2010)
pages 121-158

Ruth Butterfield Isaacson, Associate
Leland, Parachini, Steinberg, Matzger & Melnick LLP, San Francisco

Child-centered arguments have played a central role in debates over expanding marriage rights throughout history. Opponents of interracial marriage argued in Loving v. Virginia that “mixed race” children from interracial households were physically and psychologically inferior and suffered from social stigmatization. Over forty years later, child-centered arguments again took center stage in the debate over same-sex marriage. The arguments initially focused on the harms to children raised by same-sex parents—specifically, that such children suffer from stunted development and social alienation. Over the years, these arguments gradually morphed into claims that same-sex marriage harms all children, because the prevalence of same-sex marriage in society and its integration in school curriculum confuses children about gender roles and the “true” meaning of marriage. Tracing the evolution of child-centered arguments from Loving through the recent battle for same-sex marriage in California’s November 2008 election on Proposition 8 offers valuable lessons to same-sex marriage advocates about the propriety and consequences of using child-centered arguments in defining the marriage rights of adults.

INTRODUCTION

It really is what we call a teachable moment.
—Interim Director of the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco, describing a first-grade field trip to City Hall to watch a lesbian wedding.

On Friday, October 10, 2008, a group of first-grade children from the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco took a field trip to City Hall. The children’s first-grade teacher, a lesbian, was set to marry her longtime girlfriend that morning. The director of the charter school saw the wedding as a “teachable moment”—an opportunity for the children to witness firsthand the progression of civil rights in America.

Many same-sex marriage advocates heralded the first graders’ excursion as another step toward the full acceptance and integration of same-sex individuals in society. But other supporters worried that the field trip, while well intentioned, was ill timed and potentially damaging to the same-sex marriage cause. At that time, the debate over same-sex marriage had reached a significant crossroads. Earlier that year, the California Supreme Court issued a landmark decision declaring that a same-sex marriage ban violated both the due process and equal protection provisions of the California Constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage responded quickly and forcefully with Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to amend the California Constitution to define marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman. On the day of the field trip, polls on Proposition 8 showed close to a dead heat on the issue. Many same-sex marriage advocates feared that the “teachable moment” played directly into the hands of their opponents, giving them new leverage that could ultimately shift momentum in favor of Proposition 8.

Not surprisingly, just one week later, the field trip became the target of new television advertisements supporting Proposition 8. The leading organization behind the Proposition 8 campaign, ProtectMarriage.com, had cautioned for months that state recognition of same-sex marriage would, among other things, force public schools to include teaching same-sex marriage in their curriculum. In their view, the field trip was concrete and visible evidence that their fears had been realized. Playing on those fears, their ad took advantage of news footage of the wedding, particularly footage of a first-grade girl who appeared sad, and almost confused, by her teacher’s lesbian wedding. This lasting image was paired with the warning that “children will be taught about gay marriage unless we vote yes on Proposition 8.” The ad first aired on October 28, 2008; Proposition 8 passed by a 52-48 margin exactly one week later on November 4, 2008.

Appeals to child welfare are neither new nor exclusive to the same-sex marriage debate. Such appeals have also been raised in other family law disputes, most notably the fight for interracial marriage during the era of Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court decision striking down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. Opponents of interracial marriage claimed that the “mixed-race” children produced by interracial couples were biologically inferior, suffered abnormal social and psychological development, and endured stigmatization by their peers. Similarly, opponents of same-sex marriage have wielded such claims for almost two decades, although the substance of their child-based fears has evolved. Like the early arguments used by interracial marriage opponents, the first child-centered arguments in the same-sex marriage debate focused on the harms to children raised by same-sex parents—specifically, that such children suffer stunted social and psychological development and face stigmatization by their peers. Over the years, these concerns gradually morphed into fears about how same-sex marriage harms all children, because the increasing prevalence of same-sex marriage in society and its integration into school curricula confuse children about gender roles and the true meaning of marriage.

This Comment examines modern views of marriage and how child-centered appeals have influenced the discourse on expanding marital rights, particularly within the context of Loving v. Virginia, Goodridge v. Dep’t of Public Health, Hernandez v. Robles, In re Marriage Cases, the battle over Proposition 8 in California, and supporting case law and legislation. These sources evince an evolution in judicial conceptions of marriage and the childbased arguments that have been used to expand or constrict such conceptions, from anxiety over “mixed-race” children during the fight for interracial marriage to concerns in the same-sex marriage debate about the psycho-social well-being of children raised by same-sex parents and, ultimately, the effects of same-sex marriage on public school curricula. The Comment concludes with an analysis of modern marriage as defined by courts and society today, the intersection of Proposition 8’s success with contemporary marital attitudes, and the role of the judiciary in the fate of same-sex marriage…

…In defending its ban on interracial marriage, Virginia appealed to many of the same child-centered arguments that motivated the enactment of the ban 276 years earlier. In its brief to the Supreme Court, Virginia declared that states have an interest in preserving the “purity of the races and in preventing the propagation of half-breed children.” Acknowledging the reality of persistent racism, Virginia claimed its interest in keeping the races “pure” stemmed not from the repulsion interracial children invoke in society, but rather from the idea that interracial children were seen as outcasts and would be “burdened . . . with ‘a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’” Virginia also emphasized the socioscientific consequences to interracial children, including the domination of racial inferiorities within children of mixed race and the social tension that it claimed was created when races of different socioeconomic backgrounds formed a family. Interracial couples also experienced higher divorce rates, Virginia argued, which would have negative effects on the (interracial) children produced by and raised within these families…

Read the entire article here.