Mixed Race Studies

Blood Flowed Here Before Water Did

Trinidad Express
2012-09-14

Jan Westmaas

The writer continues his series on Peru and South Africa after visits to these countries in July and August

I’ve just read this morning in the daily press a story about Spanish energy company Repsol’s major oil and natural gas find in the Peruvian Amazon. This news  has put a smile on President’s Ollanta Humalla’s face but, at the same time, for prophets of doom,   it spells plunder and mayhem unparalleled even by the likes of Pizarro six centuries ago.
 
But travellers to Peru hardly ever get to the Amazon and often bypass Lima as they make for the sierra. In their estimation, it’s in the highlands that the real Peru begins — a land of dramatic, snow-capped mountains and  colourful poncho-wrapped peasants of pure Inca origin. The capital city was, and to some extent still is, seen as a western enclave on the Pacific from which  Spanish creoles could survey a vast hinterland peopled mainly by “untutored Indians” speaking another language and practicing another religion. The great 19th century German explorer Humboldt summed it up well when he said that “Lima is more remote from Peru than London”.
 
A parallel, if a little strained, is that many visitors to South Africa, once they get there, make straight for Wild Life Reserves  and a Safari Lodge. It’s as if the only reality worth experiencing is witnessing a leopard lazing under a tree with the remains of his recently caught prey, an impala, strung up on a branch overhead! At the crack of dawn in Kruger Park it was, indeed, an exhilarating experience for us to be privy to such a sight. Spectacles like this one can eclipse, for a moment, the complex human drama that has unfolded ever since the first European landed in Southern Africa.
 
Peru’s reality is that while Cusco and Machu Picchu may offer to the world a window to the achievements of a great indigenous—mainly highland — civilisation, the Inca, this country today is largely mestizo (mixture of European and Indian) with a far smaller proportion claiming pure indigenous blood than before. In addition, at least 1/3 (10 million) of its diverse population, including descendants of  Chinese and Japanese immigrants, now live in the throbbing, thriving, if sometimes chaotic, metropolis of Lima. It’s also interesting that despite significant miscegenation, descendants of  Europeans, as is the case in South Africa, still account for some 15 per cent of the population of both countries.

A walk through Plaza Mayor in Lima and a visit to the V&W Waterfront in Cape Town are indeed lessons in ethnic diversity. What an irony that a black face is a rarity in Lima when in Spanish colonial times 45 per cent of the population of that city were of African descent! It’s only in the middle of the 19th century that the trade in African slaves who replaced the indigenous people in the mines and plantations was declared illegal.

Nowadays Afro-Peruvians account for less than 1 per cent of the general population. Faced with the prospect of post abolition marginalisation in a Spanish-creole dominated post Independence Lima, many blacks, according to one commentator, opted to lighten the coffee in order to achieve social mobility, or in order, simply, to survive…

…And so it was that not long after the conquest but centuries before diversity became a buzz word, Peru gave to the world the Patron Saint of Social Justice, the Dominican San Martin de Porres. By birth “illegitimate”, this son of Lima has come to symbolise inclusion and diversity as he ministered faithfully to the poor, the sick, and the marginalised while embracing his mixed Afro-European heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru

University of Pittsburgh Press
April 2012
272 pages
6 x 9
Paper  ISBN: 9780822961932

Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Associate Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Bound Lives chronicles the lived experience of race relations in northern coastal Peru during the colonial era. Rachel Sarah O’Toole examines how Andeans and Africans negotiated and employed casta, and in doing so, constructed these racial categories. Royal and viceregal authorities separated “Indians” from “blacks” by defining each to specific labor demands. Casta categories did the work of race, yet, not all casta categories did the same type of work since Andeans, Africans, and their descendants were bound by their locations within colonialism and slavery. The secular colonial legal system clearly favored indigenous populations. Andeans were afforded greater protections as “threatened” native vassals. Despite this, in the 1640s during the rise of sugar production, Andeans were driven from their assigned colonial towns and communal property by a land privatization program. Andeans did not disappear, however; they worked as artisans, muleteers, and laborers for hire. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Andeans employed their legal status as Indians to defend their prerogatives to political representation that included the policing of Africans. As rural slaves, Africans often found themselves outside the bounds of secular law and subject to the judgments of local slaveholding authorities. Africans therefore developed a rhetoric of valuation within the market and claimed new kinships to protect themselves in disputes with their captors and in slave-trading negotiations. Africans countered slaveholders’ claims on their time, overt supervision of their labor, and control of their rest moments by invoking customary practices. Bound Lives offers an entirely new perspective on racial identities in colonial Peru. It highlights the tenuous interactions of colonial authorities, indigenous communities, and enslaved populations and shows how the interplay between colonial law and daily practice shaped the nature of colonialism and slavery.

Contents

• acknowledgments
• introduction: Constructing Casta on Peru’s Northern Coast
• chapter 1. Between Black and Indian: Labor Demands and the Crown’s Casta
• chapter 2. Working Slavery’s Value, Making Diaspora Kinships
• chapter 3. Acting as a Legal Indian: Natural Vassals and Worrisome Natives
• chapter 4. Market Exchanges and Meeting the Indians Elsewhere
• chapter 5. Justice within Slavery
• conclusion. The Laws of Casta, the Making of Race
• appendix 1. Origin of Slaves Sold in Trujillo over Time by Percentage (1640–1730)
• appendix 2. Price Trends of Slaves Sold in Trujillo (1640–1730)
• explanation of Appendix Data
• notes
• glossary
• bibliography
• index

Colonial Peru, the Caste System, and the “Purity” of Blood

South Americana: The History and Culture of the World’s Most Exotic Continent
2012-03-20

David Gaughran

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat’s blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy—Robert Lacey, Aristocrats
 
The historical Spanish obsession with the purity of blood evolved into an elaborate caste system which reached its apogee with the colonization of South America and the subsequent intermingling of settlers with both South American Indians and imported African slaves, all of whose mixed offspring needed a separate classification, of course.
 
It was an intricate system—designed to pit sections of society against each other and play on the subsequent fear of overthrow by the lower classes, so that Spain could continue to exert its top-down control. But it also signified the relative social importance of the caste members, usually in a pejorative sense, meaning that only certain rights, occupations, and institutions were open to them.
 
If you had been born in Spain, then you automatically qualified as a member of the elite. If you had been born in South America, but your bloodline was “pure” then you were accorded privileged status, but of the second order, and the most influential posts were out of reach. However, if your ancestors had the temerity to dally with the Indians or blacks, then a complicated algorithm was brought to bear….

…Caste membership didn’t simply determine what occupation you could hold, but also whether you could bear arms, attend university, or even the clothes you were allowed wear…

Read the entire article here.

Does Whitening Happen? Distinguishing between Race and Color Labels in an African-Descended Community in Peru

Social Problems
Volume 57, Number 1 (February 2010)
pages 138-156
DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.138

Tanya Golash-Boza, Professor of Sociology and American Studies
Kansas University

This article explores how race and color labels are used to describe people in an Afro-Peruvian community. This article is based on analyses of 88 interviews and 18 months of fieldwork in an African-descended community in Peru. The analyses of these data reveal that, if we consider race and color to be conceptually distinct, there is no “mulatto escape hatch,” no social or cultural whitening, and no continuum of racial categories in the black Peruvian community under study. This article considers the implications of drawing a conceptual distinction between race and color for research on racial classifications in Latin America.

Read the entire article here.

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

Duke University Press
2009
320 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4401-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4420-9

Edited by:

Matthew D. O’Hara, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Andrew Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands.

Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Irene Silverblatt
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America / Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara
• 1. Aristocracy on the Auction Block: Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru / Jeremy Mumford
• 2. A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí­ / Jane E. Mangan
• 3. Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain / David Tavárez
• 4. The Many Faces of Colonialism in Two Iberoamerican Borderlands: Northern New Spain and the Eastern Lowlands of Charcas / Cynthia Radding
• 5. Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendents in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil / Mariana L. R. Dantas
• 6. Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations of the Essence of Parso-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End of Empire / Ann Twinam
• 7. Patricians and Plebians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism / Sergio Serulnikov
• 8. Conjuring Identities: Race, Nativeness, Local Citizenship, and Royal Slavery on an Imperial Frontier (Revisiting El Cobre, Cuba) / María Elena Díaz
• 9. Indigenous Citizenship: Liberalism, Political Participation, and Ethic Identity in Post-Independence Oaxaca and Yucatán / Karen D. Caplan
• Conclusion / R. Douglas Cope
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

Professor Alcira Dueñas: Illuminating the Andes: Indigenous and Mestizo Intellectuals in Colonial Peru

¿Qué Pasa, OSU?
Ohio State University
Autumn 2009

Michael J. Alarid

A citizen of Colombia, Professor Alcira Dueñas is a historian who conducts research on the cultural and intellectual history of Amerindians and other subordinated groups of the Peruvian Andes during the colonial era. Professor Dueñas earned her Bachelor of Arts from Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Economics, and her Master of Art and Doctorate in History from The Ohio State University, where she focused on the history of Latin America. For more than twenty years, professor Dueñas has taught courses on Colonial and Modern Latin America, Women’s history of Latin America, and modern World History. Professor Dueñas has had a distinguished career: she is a Fulbright scholar, recipient of the OSU Graduate School Alumni Research Award, and, along with a group of faculty of color from the History Department, she has recently been honored with the Distinguished University Diversity Enhancement Award from the University Senate, as well as with an equivalent distinction from the College of Humanities. …

…Professor Dueñas continues to feel indebted to OSU for her intellectual flowering, and through her OSU education she has infused an interdisciplinary approach into her historical methodology as well. Her first book, which hits shelves in the spring of 2010, utilizes tools of literary criticism and ethnohistory to highlight the presence and practices of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in colonial Peru. She develops a textual analysis of Andean manifestos, memoriales (petitions), reports, and letters to identify the rhetorical strategies these intellectuals utilized to reach out to the royal powers. Dueñas explains, “I place such analysis in the historical context of the major critical conjunctures of Spanish colonialism in the Andes, particularly the insurrections that intersected with some of the writings under study. I apply anthropological methods, as I examine issues of identity, religion, and Andean political culture.”

Professor Dueñas’ creative approach to research has resulted in her manuscript being picked up by a major academic press; the book is complete and in production with the University Press of Colorado. Her book reconstructs the history of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in mid and late colonial Peru, illuminating the writing practices and social agency of Andeans in their quest for social change. Dueñas elucidates, “I conclude that Andean scholarship from mid-and-late colonial Peru reflects the cultural changes of the colonized ethnic elites at the outset of modernity in Latin America. Their intellectual and political struggles reveal them as autonomous subjects, moving forward to undo their colonial condition of “Indians,” while expanding the intellectual sphere of colonial Peru to educated ‘Indios ladinos.’ They used writing, Transatlantic traveling, legal action, and even subtle support to rebellions, as means to improve their social standing and foster their ethnic autonomy under Spanish rule.” Dueñas concludes, “They attempted to participate in the administration of justice for Indians and seized every opportunity to occupy positions in the ecclesiastical and state bureaucracy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City”: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru

University Press of Colorado
2010
320 pages
5 line drawings, 1 map
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60732-018-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60732-019-7

Alcira Dueñas, Assistant Professor of Latin American History and World History
Ohio State University, Newark

Through newly unearthed texts virtually unknown in Andean studies, Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City” highlights the Andean intellectual tradition of writing in their long-term struggle for social empowerment and questions the previous understanding of the “lettered city” as a privileged space populated solely by colonial elites. Rarely acknowledged in studies of resistance to colonial rule, these writings challenged colonial hierarchies and ethnic discrimination in attempts to redefine the Andean role in colonial society.

Scholars have long assumed that Spanish rule remained largely undisputed in Peru between the 1570s and 1780s, but educated elite Indians and mestizos challenged the legitimacy of Spanish rule, criticized colonial injustice and exclusion, and articulated the ideas that would later be embraced in the Great Rebellion in 1781. Their movement extended across the Atlantic as the scholars visited the seat of the Spanish empire to negotiate with the king and his advisors for social reform, lobbied diverse networks of supporters in Madrid and Peru, and struggled for admission to religious orders, schools and universities, and positions in ecclesiastic and civil administration.

Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City” explores how scholars contributed to social change and transformation of colonial culture through legal, cultural, and political activism, and how, ultimately, their significant colonial critiques and campaigns redefined colonial public life and discourse. It will be of interest to scholars and students of colonial history, colonial literature, Hispanic studies, and Latin American studies.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Foundations of Seventeenth-Century Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 3. Andean Scholarship in the Eighteenth Century: Writers, Networks,and Texts
• Chapter 4. The European Background of Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 5. Andean Discourses of Justice: The Colonial Judicial System under Scrutiny
• Chapter 6. The Political Culture of Andean Elites: Social Inclusion and Ethnic Autonomy
• Chapter 7. The Politics of Identity Formation in Colonial Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 8. Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Q&A with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. About Black Experience in Latin America

Black in Latin America
Public Broadcasting Service
April 2011

Gates discusses his new project in this interview from the PBS site.

First, could you talk a little bit about this project?

I conceived of this as a trilogy of documentary series that would mimic the patterns of the triangle trade. There would be a series on Africa which was called Wonders of the African World in 1999. And then there would be a series on black America called America Behind the Color Line in 2004. And then the third part of the triangle trade was, of course, South America and the Caribbean. The triangle trade was Africa, South America, and the continental United States and Europe. That’s how I conceived of it. I’ve been thinking about it since before 1999. But the first two were easier to get funding for. Everyone knows about black people from Africa, everyone knows about the black American community. But surprisingly, and this is why the series is so important, not many people realize how “black” South America is. So of all the things I’ve done it was the most difficult to get funded and it is one of the most rewarding because it is so counter-intuitive, it’s so full of surprises. And I’m very excited about it…

The series reveals how huge a role history can play in forming a nation’s concept of race. Although each of the countries you visited has its own distinct history, did you find any commonalities between the six countries with regard to race?

Yes, each country except for Haiti went through a period of whitening, when they wanted to obliterate or bury or blend in their black roots. Each then, had a period when they celebrated their cultural heritage but as part of a multi-cultural mix and in that multi-cultural mix, somehow the blackness got diluted, blended. So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be “blackish” — really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. In other words, the poverty in each of these countries has been socially constructed as black. The upper class in Brazil is virtually all white, a tiny group of black people in the upper-middle class. And that’s true in Peru, that’s true in the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s obviously an exception because it’s a country of mulatto and black people but there’s been a long tension between mulatto and black people in Haiti. So even Haiti has its racial problems…

…How do you feel the race experience differs between Latin American nations and the United States?

Whereas we have black and white or perhaps black, white, and mulatto as the three categories of race traditionally in America, Brazil has 136 kinds of blackness. Mexico, 16. Haiti, 98. Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. But these are very real categories. In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it’s almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. Color and race are defined in strikingly different ways in each of these countries, more akin to each other than in the United States. We’re the only country to have the one-drop rule. The only one. And that’s because of the percentage of rape and sexual harassment of black women by white males during slavery and the white owners wanted to guarantee that the children of these liaisons were maintained as property…

Read the entire interview here.

Public Ceremonies and Mulatto Identity in Viceregal Lima: A Colonial Reenactment of the Fall of Troy (1631)

Colonial Latin American Review
Volume 16, Issue 2 (2007)
pages 179-201
DOI: 10.1080/10609160701644490

José R. Jouve-Martín, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies
McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

Colonial Spanish America was a highly ritualized society. From single events to cyclical celebrations, the numerous civic and religious ceremonies that took place throughout the year helped legitimize European authority over religious and administrative matters of fundamental importance for the conservation of the colonial order. While these ceremonies fostered social cohesion by promoting collective participation, the various groups present in colonial society also saw them as an opportunity to affirm their trade, race or social position (Diez Borque 1985; Acosta 1997). However, not all saw their actions equally immortalized in the pages of history. When describing these events, historical sources lend to locus particularly on the ruling classes and to minimize or disregard the participation of other groups. This can be explained in two ways: Firstly, the amount of money that the privileged classes were able to spend on the organization of their festivities greatly surpassed that of other, less fortunate sectors of society, which lacked the resources to match these more extravagant displays. Secondly, the historians and chroniclers in charge of narrating these events often belonged to the European elite, and their texts were usually commissioned or read by those in the upper echelons of society, most of whom showed very little interest in the cultural and social life of the lower castes. Only in cities and towns with a sizable indigenous population such as Cuzco or Quito did chroniclers describe the participation of mestizos and indios in public ceremonies on a regular basis, as illustrated by the studies of Fspinosa (1990) and Dean {1999), among others. Other castas, particularly those of African origin, are almost never mentioned in the so-called relaciones de fiestas, or chronicles of festivities, and, if they are, it is usually only in passing. Nevertheless, it is in part due to such brief references that we know that blacks and mulattos attended public civic and religious ceremonies in Spanish colonial America not only as silent spectators, but also as active participants.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Japanese in multiracial Peru, 1899-1942

University of California, San Diego
November 2009
335 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3355652

Stephanie Carol Moore

This study analyzes the integration of the Japanese into the politics of race and nation in Peru during the period from 1899 to 1942. The first generation of Japanese immigrants arrived in Peru at the apex of debates on national racial identity and popular challenges to the white oligarchy’s exclusive hold on national political and economic power. This dissertation examines how not only elites, but also working- and middle-class movements advocated the exclusion of the Japanese as a way of staking their claims on the nation. In this study, I argue that Peru’s marginalization of the Japanese sprang from racist structures developed in the colonial and liberal republican eras as well as from global eugenic ideologies and discourses of “yellow peril” that had penetrated Peru. The Japanese were seen through Orientalist eyes, conceptualized and homogenized as a race that acted as a single organism and that would bring only detriment to the Peruvian racial “whitening” project. Eugenics conflated women with their reproduction, leading “racial science” advocates to portray Japanese women in Peru as the nation’s ultimate danger and accuse them of attempting to conquer Peru “through their wombs.”

The Japanese men and women who settled in Peru, however, were also actors in their Peruvian communities. Many Japanese laborers, largely Okinawan, were participants in rural labor movements in Peru. Policymakers, hacienda owners, and local power holders, however, undermined class-based challenges to their authority by demonizing the Japanese as a cultural, racial, and political threat to the Peruvian nation. In stepping out of their rung on the racial hierarchy, the Japanese shop keepers also provoked resentment both among their fellow Peruvian business owners and elements within the urban labor movement. The deeper the Japanese Peruvians sank their roots into Peru, the more shrill became the accusations that they were “inassimilable.” Finally, opportunistic politicians played upon the Peruvian elites’ deepest fears by accusing the Japanese immigrants of joining with Peru’s indigenous people to launch a race war.

Table of Contents

• Signature Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Lis of Tables
• Map
• Acknowledgements
• Vita
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Historical and Hemispheric Context of Japanese Immigration to Peru: Independence to 1920s
• Chapter Two: Japanese Workers on Peru’s Sugar Plantations, 1890-1923
• Chapter Three: Conflict and Collaboration: Yanaconas in the Chancay Valley
• Chapter Four: The Butcher, The Baker, and the Hatmaker: Working Class Protests against the Japanese Limeños
• Chapter Five: Race, Economic Protection, and Yellow Peril: Local Anti-Asian Campaigns and National Policy
• Chapter Six: Peru’s “Racial Destiny”: Citizenship, Reproduction, and Yellow Peril
• Epilogue
• Conclusion
• References

List of Fugures

• Figure 5.1: Anti-Asia cartoons
• Figure 5.2: “The Asian Metamorphosis”
• Figure 5.3: Business License of Y. Nishimura, Tailor, Lima
• Figure 6.1: Mundo Gráfico Cartoon

List of Tables

• Table 4.1: Selected Professions of Peruvians and Foreigners (Lima 1908)
• Table 4.2: 1940 Investigation of Japanese Bakeries, Lima
• Table 6.1: Births to Japanese Women in Lima

Order the dissertation here.