Mixed Race Studies

In Puerto Rico, a push to revive indigenous culture

The Associated Press
2015-04-20

Anica Coto

SAN LORENZO, Puerto Rico (AP) — In Puerto Rico’s misty, bamboo-studded mountains, elementary school students are studying a nearly extinct language, beating on drums and growing native crops like cassava and sweet potato as they learn about the indigenous people who lived on the island before Christopher Columbus.

The children in four towns in the island’s southeast corner play a ceremonial ball game that was called batey by the native Tainos, who were all but wiped out during colonial times. The boys and girls also learn words from the local Arawak language, which was in part rebuilt with help from linguists, and still exists in varying forms among other native groups in the hemisphere.

Now, a group of academics and educators hope to expand the Taino education program to other public schools around the U.S. territory in an effort to teach children this little known part of the territory’s history.

“If you don’t know your roots, you don’t know yourself,” said anthropologist Carlalynne Yarey Melendez, director of the Taino cultural organization that runs the educational program. “There are so many communities and schools that want the classes, but I can’t keep up with the demand.”

Puerto Ricans’ interest in the territory’s indigenous past has grown in recent years, with 42,000 of the 3.7 million people then living on the island identifying themselves as at least partially Taino in the 2010 Census.

But even though that’s just a little more than 1 percent, Puerto Rico’s legislature is considering a proposal to declare Melendez’s Naguake organization to be the island’s first indigenous-based community. The designation would allow it to receive federal funds under a program that aids native groups, and expand the program to other towns…

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White Puerto Rican Migration and the Effacement of Blackness

UPLIFTT: United People for Latinos in Film, TV and Theater
2015-02-13

William Garcia

t was August 2009 when I was admitted to the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras and that what was when I first saw the amalgamation of a new breed of Puerto Rican I had never encountered before in my life, the guaynabit@s/blanquit@s. Most impoverished and working-class people in Puerto Rico call them guaynabit@s, guaynabich@s and/or blanquit@s; derivatives from the word blanquito, meaning white Puerto Ricans with money. I remembered that I heard those terms when I had been in the barrio of Sabana Seca in Toa Baja and somebody started saying “En poco le rompo la cara al guaynabito pendejo ese…” and also heard, “Ese es un blanquito de la YUPI…” I wondered what could a guyanabit@ or a blanquit@ be? Most of the guaynabit@s or blanquit@s were dressed in different styles: some were dressed like hipsters, others dressed like yuppies, followed by west coast-looking surfers while others dressed in European fashions. Most of them were the whitest Puerto Ricans I had ever seen in all my life and had no problem in taking pride in their whiteness.

Many of them spoke English very well but unlike New York Puerto Ricans they spoke like white Americans with the ‘bro’, ‘totally’ and ‘dude’ colloquialisms. They uttered the words, ‘like’ and ‘loca’, in the same sentence every time they spoke. I was impressed by the way they were speaking in Spanglish with an Anglo-American twist because it was these people who were supposed to hate Nuyorican Spanglish and be patriotic ‘Spanish Only’ Puerto Ricans. They behaved very similarly to U.S hipsters who talked about hipsters but never admitted they were the very hipsters they criticized. These blanquit@s were the same way, always criticizing upper-class people without looking in the mirror.

There I was with an old New York Yankees fitted baseball cap, a long white t-shirt, and my crusty Nike sneakers. My black skin covered in tattoos wanted to disappear in thin-air like Chevy Chase in the movie Invisible Man. It was obvious that they enjoyed a good chunk of white supremacy and privilege and didn’t mix with Puerto Ricans of darker hues even if Puerto Rican nationalism stressed that we were all mixed. One could tell that most of the professors at UPR-Rio Piedras came from the same blanquit@/guyanabit@ stock, which probably did not think much of me either, even though they never gave me an unfair grade and even to this day I am grateful for that. It might have been because they had the privilege of being color-blind. Most of those professors also refrained from talking about blackness, stateside Puerto Ricans or anything that questioned their privileged gatekeeping, prophetic intellectual identity and above all; archetypical Puerto Rican identity. I would spend five more years defending the Puerto Rican diaspora and contemporary blackness in those classrooms which was usually rebutted by a simple silent treatment by the professor and the students.

It was surprising for me to see white privileged Puerto Ricans play plena, bomba, and salsa music considering that those are Afro-diasporic derived musical inheritances of black resistance. This usurpation of black culture caused me frustration because I knew that black Puerto Rican culture was more than listening to salsa while getting drunk off of Medalla Lights on the Juan Ponce de Leon Blvd. I noticed that what acclaimed Afro-Puerto Rican scholar, writer and researcher, Isar Godreau argued was right: that there is a selective celebration of blackness in Puerto Rico. A selective blackness that was folklorized and distanced that does not require critically assessing inner-workings that contribute racial inequity and injustice. In these academic spaces most black Puerto Ricans seemed more interested in being accepted as Puerto Rican first before being black and never spoke about racism and white supremacy, always reinforcing racial harmony…

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Charcoal and Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature

University Press of Florida
2000-04-09
192 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1736-5
Paper ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-2717-3

Claudette M. Williams, Senior Lecturer
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica

Charcoal and Cinnamon explores the continuing redefinition of women of African descent in the Caribbean, focusing on the manner in which literature has influenced their treatment and contributed to the formation of their shifting identities.

While various studies have explored this subject, much of the existing research harbors a blindness to the literature of the non-English-speaking territories. Claudette Williams bases her analyses on poetry and prose from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic and enhances it by comparing these writings with the literatures of the English- and French-speaking Caribbean territories.

Williams also questions the tendency of some of the established schools of feminism to de-emphasize the factor of race in their gender analyses. A novel aspect of this work, indicated by the allusion to “charcoal” and “cinnamon” in its title, is its focus on the ways in which many writers use language to point to subtle distinctions between black and brown (mulatto) women.

The originality of Williams’s approach is also evident in her emphasis on the writer’s attitudes toward race rather than on the writer’s race itself. She brings to the emotionally charged subject of the politics of color the keen analysis and sustained research of a scholar, as well as the perceptive personal insights of an African-ancestored Caribbean woman.

Though the main focus is on literary works, the book will also be a valuable reference for courses on Caribbean history, sociology, and psychology.

Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico

University of Illinois Press
February 2015
320 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.
38 black & white photographs, 3 maps, 1 chart, 3 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03890-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-08045-6

Isar P. Godreau, Researcher and Former Director
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Ideas of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture in a Puerto Rican barrio

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race—created to overcome U.S. colonial power—simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.

Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black.

Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country

Markus Wiener Publishers
2013-08-26
154 pages
Paperback ISBN: 1558760725; ISBN-13: 9781558760721

José Luis González (1926-1996)

In this work, González dismantles the myth of a dominant Spanish and racially white national culture in Puerto Rican history. He claims that the national identity is primarily Mestizo (mixed race) with a significant contribution from Africa. González calls the African slaves and Mestizo peasantry the first Puerto Ricans because they were the first inhabitants who had to make the island their home. Having witnessed successful uprisings in neighboring Haiti, the Spanish authorities encouraged white immigrants to settle in Puerto Rico in an attempt to “whiten” the population, then thought to be tilting dangerously to the advantage of the Afro-Antilleans. These immigrants became the small but influential class of landowners and, later, urban professionals.

According to the author’s grand metaphor, Afro-Antilleans and Mestizos constitute the first “storey,” or tier, of the “Puerto Rican house” of the title, landowners the second, urban professionals the third, and the managerial class the fourth.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country
• Literature and National Identity in Puerto Rico
• “Plebeyism” and Art in Today’s Puerto Rico
• The “Lamento Borincano”: A Sociological Interpretation
• On Puerto Rican Literature of the 1950s
• Bernardo Vega: A Fighter and His People
• The Writer in Exile
• Bibliographical Note
• Glossary of Names

Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television

Duke University Press
2005
280 pages
24 b&w photos
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3543-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3531-3

Yeidy M. Rivero, Associate Professor in the Department of Screen Arts and Culture and the Program in American Culture
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Tuning Out Blackness fills a glaring omission in U.S. and Latin American television studies by looking at the history of Puerto Rican television. In exploring the political and cultural dynamics that have shaped racial representations in Puerto Rico’s commercial media from the late 1940s to the 1990s, Yeidy M. Rivero advances critical discussions about race, ethnicity, and the media. She shows that televisual representations of race have belied the racial egalitarianism that allegedly pervades Puerto Rico’s national culture. White performers in blackface have often portrayed “blackness” in local television productions, while black actors have been largely excluded.

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and textual analysis, Rivero considers representations of race in Puerto Rico, taking into account how they are intertwined with the island’s status as a U.S. commonwealth, its national culture, its relationship with Cuba before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the massive influx of Cuban migrants after 1960. She focuses on locally produced radio and television shows, particular television events, and characters that became popular media icons—from the performer Ramón Rivero’s use of blackface and “black” voice in the 1940s and 1950s, to the battle between black actors and television industry officials over racism in the 1970s, to the creation, in the 1990s, of the first Puerto Rican situation comedy featuring a black family. As the twentieth century drew to a close, multinational corporations had purchased all Puerto Rican stations and threatened to wipe out locally produced programs. Tuning Out Blackness brings to the forefront the marginalization of nonwhite citizens in Puerto Rico’s media culture and raises important questions about the significance of local sites of television production.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Translating Televisual Blackness
• 1. Caribbean Negritos: Ramon Rivero, Blackface, and Black Voice in Puerto Rico
• 2. Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and the Resurgent Popularity of Blackface
• 3. The CubaRican Space Revisited
• 4. Mi familia: A Black Puerto Rican Televisual Family
• 5. Translating and Representing Blackness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Migrating race: migration and racial identification among Puerto Ricans

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Number 3 (2014-02-23)
pages 383-404
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.672759

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

The pattern of racial identification among Puerto Ricans is not uniform. It varies depending on where they live. Most identify as white, but more do so in Puerto Rico than in the USA. This paper addresses the impact that living alternatively in the USA and in Puerto Rico has on racial identification among Puerto Ricans. Using Public Use Microdata Sample data from the American Community Survey and the Puerto Rico Community Survey 2006–2008, I find that while there is no single pattern of impact, those more grounded on the island’s racial system are more likely to identify as white in the USA, while those less grounded in Puerto Rico are more likely to identify as multiracial or by another racial descriptor. On their return to the island, they revert to the prevalent pattern of racial identification, while still exhibiting effects of their sojourn on their racial identity.

Census data on Puerto Ricans and race manifest the contingent nature of racial identity and identification and how specific racial formations impact an individual’s understanding of race and racial identification. Despite contemporary projections of Puerto Ricans as a multiracial people (Davila 1997), in fact a mulatto nation (Torres 1998; Duany 2002). the majority of Puerto Ricans portray themselves as white in the context of official statistics. This is the case for both Puerto Ricans on the island and in the USA. Their location, however, determines the proportions by which they identify as white or as something else.

Presently, more than half of the 8.3 million people who identify as Puerto Ricans live in the USA. Moreover, there is a recurrent movement of migrants between the island and the USA, with net migration reaching the hundreds of thousands between decades (Rivera-Batiz and Santiago 1996; Duany 2002; Acosla-Belen and…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Changing Space, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia, and the Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Volume 9,  Issue 3, 2002
pages 281-304
DOI: 10.1080/10702890213969

Isar Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

In this article, I critique some of the discursive terms in which blackness is folklorized and celebrated institutionally as part of the nation in Puerto Rico. I examine a government-sponsored housing project that meant to revitalize and stylize the community of San Antón, in Ponce, as a historic black site. Although government officials tried to preserve what they considered to be traditional aspects of this community, conflict arose because not all residents agreed with this preservationist agenda. I document the controversy, linking the government’s approach to racial discourses that represent blackness as a vanishing and distant component of Puerto Rico. I argue that this inclusion and celebration complements ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and race-mixture that distance blackness to the margins of the nation and romanticize black communities as remnants of a past era. I link these dynamics to modernizing State agendas and discourses of authenticity that fuel cultural nationalism worldwide.

In March 1995, The San Juan Star, one of Puerto Rico’s leading newspapers, announced that “Puerto Ricans will ‘bleach away’ many of the physical traces of its African past by the year 2200, with the rest of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean following a few centuries later” (Bliss 1995:30). The article, which was written to commemorate the 122nd year anniversary of the abolition of slavery on the island, also seemed to be commemorating the future “abolition” of blackness itself, “in two centuries.” said one of the experts interviewed, “there will hardly be any blacks in Puerto Rico” (historian, Luis Diaz Soler, in Bliss 1995: 30).

This racial forecast and concomitant claims to the gradual disappearance of black cultural manifestations reinforces ideologies of blanqueamiento well known and thoroughly documented in Latin America (Burdick 1992; de la Fuente 2001; Lancaster 1991; Martinez-Echazabal 1999; Skidmore 1974; Stephan 1991; Wade 1993,1997; and Whitten and Torres 1992. among others). Scholars and activists have demonstrated that such notions of whitening often go hand in hand with…

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Who is Black?

The Final Call
2001-07-10

Rosa Clemente, Guest Columnist

Rosa Clemente

Yesterday, an interesting thing happened to me. I was told I am not Black.

The kicker for me was when my friend stated that the island of Puerto Rico was not a part of the African Diaspora. I wanted to go back to the old skool playground days and yell: “You said what about my momma?!” But after speaking to several friends, I found out that many Black Americans and Latinos agree with him. The miseducation of the Negro is still in effect!

I am so tired of having to prove to others that I am Black, that my peoples are from the Motherland, that Puerto Rico, along with Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic, are part of the African Diaspora. Do we forget that the slave ships dropped off our people all over the world, hence the word Diaspora?…

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