Mixed Race Studies

Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States since 1898―and a colony of Spain for 400 years before ―was very much subjected, by the empires and local criollo elites, to eugenicist ideas. “Race” science, in the first-half of the twentieth century, allowed criollo elites to create new racializing parameters while inserting “progressive” measures of social hygiene, public health, and eugenics to promote ideas of modernization, progress, and civilization. These seemingly progressive ideas were cemented on the figure of “el jibaro” (a white Puerto Rican farmworker) as the mythical symbol of the Puerto Rican nation which is constructed as a product of the mixture of Black, indigenous, and Spanish. Discursively constructing Puerto Ricanness as the mixture of three “races” allows for an erasure of racialization processes and the systematic racist structure of Puerto Rican nationalism as an all-inclusive ideology of exclusion. The conflation of these three “races” to create a white/light-skinned farmworker signify an erasure of the “factors”/bodies that were assumed to compose the idea behind Puerto Rican nationalism. Additionally, by seeing these three “races” as a mere factor for the creation of the “jibaro” it invisibilized those bodies which—in the criollo elite’s views—did not belong unless they were to “better the ‘race”(an intrinsic eugenic idea rooted in popular belief around certain kinds of racial mixture “pa’ mejorar la raza”). Hence, Blackness and Indigeneity in Puerto Rico are discursively mounted to create a seemingly mixed—dare I say, post-racial—society as long as Black and indigenous bodies mix and assimilate to the “jibaro nation.” This is to say, everything that falls outside of the national symbol of the “jibaro”—which strives for a lighter skin—becomes systematically pathologized. Hence, even if mixed-race identity is assumed to be the organizing principle, it is anti-Blackness and the systemic striving to achieve whiteness that operates as the driving force of Puerto Rican society.

R. Sánchez-Rivera, “Shilling for U.S. Empire: The Legacies of Scientific Racism in Puerto Rico,” The Abusable Past, June 22, 2020. https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/shilling-for-u-s-empire-the-legacies-of-scientific-racism-in-puerto-rico/.

Shilling for U.S. Empire: The Legacies of Scientific Racism in Puerto Rico

The Abusable Past
Radical History Review
2020-06-22

R. Sánchez-Rivera
Department of Sociology
University of Cambridge

Pablo Delano, A Group of newly made Americans at Ponce, Porto Rico, (detail from the conceptual art installation The Museum of the Old Colony, 2016-ongoing). Source: Stereocard published by M. H. Zahner, Niagara Falls, New York, 1898. Photographer not identified.

Recently, a published, peer-reviewed article caused a great deal of controversy when it circulated among many academic Facebook pages such as Latinx Scholars, Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)-Puerto Rico Section. This article, “Economic Development in Puerto Rico after US Annexation: Anthropometric Evidence,” written by Brian Marein, a PhD student in economics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, brings together data to show that the average height of men in Puerto Rico increased by 4.2cm after the U.S. “annexation” (a euphemism for colonization). The author uses anthropometrics to argue that U.S. colonialism was actually beneficial to Puerto Ricans “in contrast to the prevailing view in the literature.” His main conclusion is that because U.S. officials brought in resources, food, and education, the life of Puerto Ricans improved (inferred by the increased height of men) as a result of colonization.

Anthropometrics refers to the measuring of people’s bodies and skeletons to correlate their difference to “racial” and psychological traits that privileged Eurocentric ideas of beauty, intelligence, ableness, morality, among others. This stems from a long history of “race science” that surged from the polygenetic assumption that (1) “race” was a biological type and (2) “races” had distinct origins. Two major theories of human origins and heredity dominated during the nineteenth century: monogenism and polygenism. Thinkers who advocated for monogenism argued that all humans came from the same origin but were in different developmental stages (usually with Whites at the top and Black people at the bottom). However, during the second half of the nineteenth century polygenism, or the notion that the “races” had separate origins and should be considered as distinct and immutable species, became more widely accepted…

Read the entire article here.