Mixed Race Studies

Written Out of History

Pomona College Magazine
Pomona College, Claremont, California
Fall 2002
Volume 39, Number 1

Michael Balchunas

Spurred by a glimpse of family history, Professor Sid Lemelle is bringing to light a little-known aspect of the African Diaspora.

When the new people moved in, all eyes were upon them. There were comments about the way they looked, how much money they might have, what kind of work they did, their morals, their customs and their character. At first, it was all good. The newcomers, who were farmers, engineers, mechanics and other workers, wrote to friends left behind and extolled the virtues of their new home. That stirred pangs of fear among some residents, and a newspaper ran an editorial. More of these people might come, it said, and “since the Negro is a creature of imitation and not invention…they will degenerate…and [become] vicious…a nuisance and pest to society.”

The year was 1857, and the newcomers, from Louisiana, had settled near Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, about 50 miles inland from the Caribbean port of Veracruz. Their history, like much of the history of the African Diaspora, is virtually unknown.

Sidney Lemelle is working to change that…

…Another misperception is that the U.S. South was a strictly bipolar society of white masters and black slaves, he says. In antebellum Louisiana, a significant number of white planters, businessmen and government officials fathered mixed-race offspring, who became part of a stratum more privileged than slaves, other free blacks or poorer white residents, according to Lemelle. He is particularly intrigued by how race and racial identity issues were connected to property rights and ownership in Louisiana and Mexico in the 19th century. Building on the theories of UCLA legal scholar Cheryl Harris, he believes that “whiteness” was constructed by mixed-blood people and became the basis of racialized privilege; that “whiteness” was legitimized as a form of status property, which gave some individuals rights over others, even though both possessed African blood…

Read the entire article here.

The erasure of the Afro element of mestizaje in modern Mexico: the coding of visibly black mestizos according to a white aesthetic in and through the discourse on nation during the cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968

University of British Columbia
September 2001
166 pages

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Associate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Faculty of Graduate Studies.

“The Erasure of the Essential Afro Element of Mestizaje in Modern Mexico: The Coding of Visibly Black Mestizos According to a White Aesthetic In and Through the Discourse on Nation During the Cultural Phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968″ examines how the Afro elements of Mexican mestizaje were erased from the ideal image of the Mexican mestizo and how the Afro ethnic contributions were plagiarized in modern Mexico. It explores part of the discourse on nation in the narrative produced by authors who subscribed to the belief that only white was beautiful, between 1920 and 1968, during a period herein identified as the “cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution.” It looks at the coding and distortion of the image of visibly black Mexicans in and through literature and film, and unveils how the Afro element “disappeared” from some of the most popular images, tastes in music, dance, song, food, and speech forms viewed as cultural texts that, by way of official intervention, were made “badges” of Mexican national identity.

The premise of this study is that the criollo elite and their allies, through government, disenfranchised Mexicans as a whole by institutionalizing a magic mirror—materialized in the narrative of nation—where mestizos can “see” only a partial reflection of themselves. The black African characteristics of Mexican mestizaje were totally removed from the ideal image of “Mexican-ness” disseminated in and out of the country. During this period, and in the material selected for study, wherever Afro-Mexicans—visibly Afro or not—are mentioned, they appear as “mestizos” oblivious of their African heritage and willingly moving toward becoming white.

The analysis adopts as critical foundation two essays: “Black Phobia and the White Aesthetic in Spanish American Literature,” by Richard L. Jackson; and “Mass Visual Productions,” by James Snead. In “Black Phobia…” Jackson explains that, to define “superior and inferior as well as the concept of beauty” according to how white a person is perceived to be, is a “tradition dramatized in Hispanic Literature from Lope de Rueda’s Eufemia (1576) to the present” (467). For Snead, “the coding of blacks in film, as in the wider society, involves a history of images and signs associating black skin color with servile behavior and marginal status” (142).

Read the entire thesis here.

Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640

Indiana University Press
2005-02-02
288 pages
1 bibliog., 1 index, 6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21775-2; ISBN: 0-253-21775-X

Herman L. Bennett, Professor of Latin American History
City Univerisity of New York

The African community in colonial Mexico under Spanish and Catholic rule.

In this study of the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World, Herman L. Bennett has uncovered much new information about the lives of slave and free blacks, the ways that their lives were regulated by the government and the Church, the impact upon them of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Africans, Absolutism, and Archives
1. Soiled Gods and the Formation of a Slave Society
2. “The Grand Remedy”: Africans and Christian Conjugality
3. Policing Christians: Persons of African Descent before the Inquisition and Ecclesiastical Courts
4. Christian matrimony and the Boundaries of African Self-Fashioning
5. Between Property and Person: Jurisdictional Conflicts over Marriage
6. Creoles and Christian Narratives
Postscript
Glossary
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Africanastudies: YouTube Channel

First Documentary Posted: 2008-03-27

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

Reconstructs the involuntary planetary dispersion of African populations, with their millenary cultural capitals, between the 15th and 19th centuries; and analyses the africanization of the places of arrival through their ethnic contributions.

Reconstruye la dispersión planetaria involuntaria de poblaciones africanas, con sus capitales culturales milenarios, entre los siglos XV y XIX; y analiza la africanización, mediante sus aportaciones étnicas, de los lugares de llegada.

View all of the documentaries here.
Also visit the blog here.

Africa in Mexico: A Repudiated Heritage/África en México: una herencia repudiada

Edwin Mellen Press
2007
140 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-5216-8; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-5216-9

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

This study explores the African presence in Mexico and the impact it has had on the development of Mexican national identity over the past centuries. By analyzing Mexican miscegenation from a perspective identified as mestizaje positivo (positive miscegenation) where an equality exists among all ethnic heritages are equal forming the glue that binds together the new ethnicity, it reveals that Mexico’s African heritage is alive and well. In the end, the author calls for further examinations into the damage caused to the majority of the Mexican population by a Eurocentric mentality that marks them as inferior.

The Africanization of Mexico from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

Edwin Mellen Press
2010
212 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-3781-9; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-3781-4

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

This work is an Afrocentric analysis that subscribes to the notion that there is one human race of multiple ethnicities. It acknowledges Mexico’s African, Amerindian (herein after called First Nations), Asian, and European ethnic heritages. Contrary to the African-disappearance-by-miscegenation-hypothesis-turned-ideology, it introduces the theory of the widespread Africanization of Mexico from the sixteenth century onward.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Álvaro Ochoa Serrano
Introduction
1. African National Names as Denigrating, Obscene and Scatological Language in Mexican Spanish
2. The Colors of Mexican Racism
3. The Africans and Afrodescendants who Constructed Veracruz and the Jarocho Ethos 1521-1778
4. The African Sahelo-Sudanic Belt in the Birth of Mexican Vaqueros and Vaquero Culture in the Veracruz Lowlands
5. Tracing the Afro-Mexican Path: 1813-1910
6. Mexican Food is Soul Food: A Medicine for National Amnesia
7. The Africanness of Mexican Traditional Medicine
8. Memín Pinguín, Hermelinda Linda and Andanzas de Aniceto: The Dark Side of “Light-Reading”
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican demography approximates the present-day ancestry of Mestizos throughout the territory of Mexico

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 139 Issue 3
Pages 284 – 294
Published Online: 2009-01-12

Rodrigo Rubi-Castellanos
Instituto de Investigación en Genética Molecular, Centro Universitario de la Ciénega, (CUCiénega-UdeG), Ocotlán, Jalisco, México

Gabriela Martínez-Cortés
Instituto de Investigación en Genética Molecular, Centro Universitario de la Ciénega, (CUCiénega-UdeG), Ocotlán, Jalisco, México

José Francisco Muñoz-Valle
Instituto de Investigación en Reumatología y del Sistema Músculo-Esquelético, Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud (CUCS-UdeG), Guadalajara, Jalisco, México

Antonio González-Martín
Departamento de Zoología y Antropología Física, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), 28040 Madrid, Spain

Ricardo M. Cerda-Flores
Departamento de Genética de Poblaciones y Bioinformática, Centro de Investigación Biomédica del Noreste (CIBN-IMSS), Monterrey, Nuevo León, México

Manuel Anaya-Palafox
Laboratorio de Genética Forense, Instituto Jalisciense de Ciencias Forenses (IJCF), Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, México

Héctor Rangel-Villalobos
Instituto de Investigación en Genética Molecular, Centro Universitario de la Ciénega, (CUCiénega-UdeG), Ocotlán, Jalisco, México

Rodrigo Rubi-Castellanos and Héctor Rangel-Villalobos contributed equally to this work.

Over the last 500 years, admixture among Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans, principally, has come to shape the present-day gene pool of Mexicans, particularly Mestizos, who represent about 93% of the total Mexican population. In this work, we analyze the genetic data of 13 combined DNA index system-short tandem repeats (CODIS-STRs) in 1,984 unrelated Mestizos representing 10 population samples from different regions of Mexico, namely North, West, Central, and Southeast. The analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) test demonstrated low but significant differentiation among Mestizos from different regions (F_ST = 0.34%; P = 0.0000). Although the spatial analysis of molecular variance (SAMOVA) predicted clustering Mestizo populations into four well-delimited groups, the main differentiation was observed between Northwest when compared with Central and Southeast regions. In addition, we included analysis of individuals of Amerindian (Purepechas), European (Huelva, Spain), and African (Fang) origin. Thus, STRUCTURE analysis was performed identifying three well-differentiated ancestral populations (k = 3). STRUCTURE results and admixture estimations by means of LEADMIX software in Mestizo populations demonstrated genetic heterogeneity or asymmetric admixture throughout Mexico, displaying an increasing North-to-South gradient of Amerindian ancestry, and vice versa regarding the European component. Interestingly, this distribution of Amerindian ancestry roughly reflects pre-Hispanic Native-population density, particularly toward the Mesoamerican area. The forensic, epidemiological, and evolutionary implications of these findings are discussed herein.

African Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation

University Press of America
June 2004
136 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-7618-2858-3 / 978-0-7618-2858-7

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

In African Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation, author Marco Polo Hernández-Cuevas explores how the Africaness of Mexican mestizaje was erased from the national memory and identity and how national African ethnic contributions were plagiarized by the criollo elite in modern Mexico. The book cites the concept of a Caucasian standard of beauty prevalent in narrative, film, and popular culture in the period between 1920 and 1968, which the author dubs as the “cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution.”

The author also delves into how criollo elite disenfranchised non-white Mexicans as a whole by institutionalizing a Eurocentric myth whereby Mexicans learned to negate part of their ethnic makeup. During this time period, wherever African Mexicans, visibly black or not, are mentioned, they appear as “mestizo,” many of them oblivious of their African heritage, and others part of a willing movement toward becoming “white.” This analysis adopts as a critical foundation Richard Jackson’s ideas about black phobia and the white aesthetic, as well as James Snead’s coding of blacks.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Revolution and Invisibility: African Mexicans and the Ideology of Mestizaje in La raza cósmica
• The Erased Africaness of Mexican Icons
• La vida inútil de Pito Pérez: Tracking the African Contribution to the Mexican Picaresque Sense of Humor
• Angelitos negros, a Film from the “Golden Age” of Mexican Cinema: Coding Visibly Black Mestizos By and Through a Far-Reaching Medium
• Modern National Discourse and La muerte de Artemio Cruz: The Illusory “Death” of African Mexican Lineage
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Yale University Press
2004-04-10
252 pages
8 1/2 x 11
100 b/w +100 color illus.
Paper ISBN: 9780300109719
Cloth ISBN: 9780300102413

Ilona Katzew, Associate Curator of Latin American Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Selected for Honorable Mention for a 2003-2004 Book Award given by the Association for Latin American Art.

The pictorial genre known as casta painting is one of the most compelling forms of artistic expression from colonial Mexico. Created as sets of consecutive images, the works portray racial mixing among the main groups that inhabited the colony: Indians, Spaniards, and Africans. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ilona Katzew places casta paintings in their social and historical context, showing for the first time the ways in which the meanings of the paintings changed along with shifting colonial politics.

The book examines how casta painting developed art historically, why race became the subject of a pictorial genre that spanned an entire century, who commissioned and collected the works, and what meanings the works held for contemporary audiences. Drawing on a range of previously unpublished archival and visual material, Katzew sheds new light on racial dynamics of eighteenth-century Mexico and on the construction of identity and self-image in the colonial world.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Painters and Paintings: A Visual Tradition and Its Historiography
• 2. “A Marvelous Variety of Colors?”: Racial Ideology and the Sistema de Castas
• 3. The Rise of Casta Painting: Exoticism and Creole Pride, 1711-1760
• 4. Changing Perspectives: Casta Painting in the Era of the Bourbon Reforms, 1760-1790
• 5. The Theater of Marvels: Casta Paintings in the Textual Microcosmos
• Concluding Remarks: A Genre with Many Meanings
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Photograph Credits
• Index

Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000

University of Georgia Press
2003-01-27
284 pages
Trim size: 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-2325-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-2781-5

Suzanne Bost, Associate Professor of English
Loyola University

In this broadly conceived exploration of how people represent identity in the Americas, Suzanne Bost argues that mixture has been central to the definition of race in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Her study is particularly relevant in an era that promotes mixed-race musicians, actors, sports heroes, and supermodels as icons of a “new” America. Bost challenges the popular media’s notion that a new millennium has ushered in a radical transformation of American ethnicity; in fact, this paradigm of the “changing” face of America extends throughout American history.

Working from literary and historical accounts of mulattas, mestizas, and creoles, Bost analyzes a tradition, dating from the nineteenth century, of theorizing identity in terms of racial and sexual mixture. By examining racial politics in Mexico and the United States; racially mixed female characters in Anglo-American, African American, and Latina narratives; and ideas of mixture in the Caribbean, she ultimately reveals how the fascination with mixture often corresponds to racial segregation, sciences of purity, and white supremacy. The racism at the foundation of many nineteenth-century writings encourages Bost to examine more closely the subtexts of contemporary writings on the “browning” of America.

Original and ambitious in scope, Mulattas and Mestizas measures contemporary representations of mixed-race identity in the United States against the history of mixed-race identity in the Americas. It warns us to be cautious of the current, millennial celebration of mixture in popular culture and identity studies, which may, contrary to all appearances, mask persistent racism and nostalgia for purity.