Mixed Race Studies

An African King in Bolivia

The New York Times
2015-11-17

David Gonzalez, Side Street Columnist; Lens Blog Co-Editor

King Don Julio Pinedo being helped by his son, Rolando Pinedo, the prince, into a royal cloak. Queen Angelica oversees the details of her husband’s royal dress. Don Julio is shy and does not feel comfortable dressing as a king. (Susana Giron)

Tucked away in an isolated part of Bolivia, there is a royal family whose existence is as surprising as it is humble. Despite his title, King Don Julio I and his wife live in a small apartment atop a small store in Mururata, Bolivia, where he farms coca leaves and other crops.

Yet this modest monarch can trace his lineage to West Africa, where his ancestor Prince Uchicho was enslaved in 1820 and taken by the Spaniards to work in the silver mines of the region. That era gave rise to the country’s Afro-Bolivian population, which sustained the tradition, which was largely ceremonial, said Susana Giron, a Spanish photographer who was intrigued by the life of the current king, who was born 73 years ago as Julio Pinedo…

…Ms. Giron said that a historian who purchased the old hacienda — where the Pinedos had taken the names of the slave owners — learned about the royal connection to Africa and set about to find an heir. His efforts, she said, led him to Julio Pinedo, who was named king in 1992.

“He is a symbolic figure,” she said. “For the Afro-Bolivians, he is important because he gives them a cultural identity. It shows they are a people descended from Africa. It is about their history and culture.”

The history of Africans in Latin America has been coming more and more to the fore in recent years. In Bolivia, it was not until recently that they were even counted in the national census, with their 2012 population pegged at some 23,000 in a country of 10 million. They still face discrimination and socioeconomic obstacles…

Read the entire article and view the slide show here.

Rescuing Discarded Images of Everyday Black Life

The New York Times
2015-10-20

David Gonzalez, Side Street Columnist

Who throws away family photos? How do faded, blurry squares that chronicled weddings, ballgames and goofy moments at home end up abandoned, tossed to the curb or in boxes bought sight unseen at storage auctions?

Zun Lee has been wondering about this ever since he stumbled upon a dozen Polaroids scattered on a Detroit sidewalk. He had gone to Motown as part of his work on “Father Figure,” his book about African-American fatherhood. The sight of those images — children playing in a yard — stopped him. He asked around, but no one knew who was in the pictures. And while someone didn’t want these images, Mr. Lee did: They showed an ordinary beauty. Their fate hinted at hard times. Yet, in a frozen moment, they showed their subjects with love.

Mr. Lee was hooked. He started to haunt flea markets, yard sales and eBay in search of more of these images, to the point that he now has some 3,500 of them, ranging from the 1970s through the 2000s. Taken in a time before Instagram or Everyday Black America, they accomplish the same thing: to show African-American life as it was lived…

…The idea itself is also, for him, a response to how African-American communities have been depicted, something he cares about as the son of a Korean mother and an African-American father. Tired of the conventional wisdom that African-American fathers were absent, he set out to show a contrary reality. Similarly, his interest in collecting family pictures and turning them into a project was a response to “Found Pictures in Detroit,” a project and book by two Italian photographers who also showcased discarded images, with many of them showing crime scenes, suspects and victims…

Read the entire article and view the slide show here.

Exploring African-American Fatherhood

The New York Times
Lens: Photography, Video and Visual Journalism
2012-06-15

David Gonzalez, Co-editor of Lens

What compels you to shoot? That was the question David Alan Harvey asked his students during a workshop last year in Brooklyn. We all have our reasons — if not our obsessions — flashes of realization that come through the viewfinder and into our hearts. For Zun Lee, one of the students, the answer was uneasily evident.

As a street photographer, he had always been attracted to fleeting scenes of fathers and children. He was drawn to those moments, even if he wasn’t quite sure why.

Well, maybe he was.

“In 2004, I discovered my biological dad was African-American,” said Mr. Lee, who had been raised in a Korean family in Germany. “It had basically been a one-night stand. He ran away when he learned she was pregnant. She doesn’t even remember his name anymore.”

That revelation would inform his latest work — “Father Figure,” an exploration into the lives of black fathers.  Working over the last year in New York, Chicago and Toronto, where he now lives and works as a health consultant, he has delved into the lives of men who have made the choice to stay near their children as best they can…

…“Learning about my biological father wasn’t just a traumatic experience,” Mr. Lee said. “Learning the news was in a weird sense a homecoming.”…

Read the entire article here.