1

“Passing” Ethnicities and Identities

Text written within the framework of the collective action art project “María de Salazar”1

Susana Martínez Restrepo, PhD2

January, 2013

I first realized I was white at 18. This first experience “passing” ethnicities or identities occurred when I

moved to France and people thought I was Spanish or Italian. During my first winter far from the tropics, my

newly acquired “European Mediterranean” identity matched my whiter skin and straight hair. Although this

was a revealing experience because I always thought I was of a mixed race, mestiza, I must admit I was

happy “passing” as European. After all, I do have Spanish blood; and isn‟t Martínez a last name that

originated in Spain?

When I was 23, I lived with an indigenous community (YINE) in the Peruvian Amazon for a summer. The

admiration for the indigenous women I might have descended from, created this romantic ideal in my head

that I was partly like them. But YINE children would scream “Gringa” everyday when they saw how white

my skin was compared to theirs during my morning swim at the Madre de Dios River.

A few years later I moved to Singapore and I officially became White-Caucasian. I mean officially because

in France racial categories are not allowed and because this was the first time I had to register my race in

official documents. For Singaporean purposes, White-Caucasians are Westerners with big eyes and big

noses. Culturally, I felt so distant from ethnic Chinese or Malays that I embraced my new identity and

shared it with my fellow Australians, Americans and British.

1 Collective action art project “Maria de Salazar”, by Jorge Restrepo, 2012 2 Susana Martínez Restrepo is an associate researcher in the areas of Poverty, the Millennium Development Goals, and Human Development of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, with headquarters in New York City. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled, “The economics of adolescents‟ time allocation: Evidence of the impact of the Young Agent Project in Brazil,” Economics of Education program at Columbia University in New York. During her doctoral studies, she worked on several research projects at NCREST (National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching, Teacher‟s College) and The Earth Institute, both at Columbia U.; as well as Harlem Children‟s Zone (an NGO). She also worked as an associate researcher for the Centre for Governance and Leadership of the Prime Minister‟s office, Singapore. She has a Master‟s degree in Comparative Politics and an undergraduate degree in Political Science and Latin American Studies from the Institute of Political Studies, Sciences-Po Paris. Her research interests include educational policies and employment for young people and women in vulnerable situations and risk behavior in adolescents.

2

When I moved to New York City, I automatically became darker just by being considered Hispanic/Latina3

locally. My skin did not change; it remained the same. It gets a darker tone in summer and becomes lighter

in winter. The same goes for my black hair: it gets curly and messy in summer and straight in winter. My

eyes were still hazel, but I was seen as darker for the sole reason that I am a part of the largest minority,

one that is on average darker than the descendants of British, Polish, Irish, Russians and Germans

considered to be mainstream white-Americans. After initial resistance to being compared with Dominicans

and Puerto Ricans, I finally embraced my new identity and I rapidly discovered the advantages of being a

Hispanic/Latina in New York: from free sodas and extra chicken on my sandwich, to affirmative action or

diversity oriented policies giving priorities to Latino women for scholarships and even certain jobs. From my

new adopted (or imposed) identity, I also loved to be a counter stereotype of ignorant generalizations about

Hispanics in New York. Due to traditional immigration flows in New York from Puerto Rico, the Dominican

Republic and more recently Mexico, local stereotypes are often of people with dark skin, lazy, loud, with

oversized families, limited education, living under help of welfare and mostly undocumented (Haslip-Viera &

Baver, 1997).4

In this essay, I will explore why it can be so easy, at least for some, “passing” ethnicities and identities and

what is the role of colonial and post-colonial history in shaping of our racial (racist) definitions and identities.

This essay is part of an art family project, which explores our whitening process, by visually darkening our

skin colors: That darker skin of the mixture between indigenous, African and Spanish, or other European

ancestors that has almost disappeared from our physical features.

Free of all colors

Miscegenation, or the creation of racial categories and the construction of citizenship, has been a slow

process made in several stages in my home country, Colombia. During colonization, Spanish men raped,

lived with, procreated and/or married indigenous women and black slaves creating a vast population of

whites, slaves and „free of all colors”. The paradox is that during colonial times, the Spanish created

3 In the United States, Hispanic or Latino is a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race. The origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person‟s ancestors before their arrival in the United States. Because of previous migration trends, stereotypes (that vary according to States) are of people of a certain ethnicity. In New York for example, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and more recently Mexicans account for most of the Hispanic or Latino Population. 4 See as well http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/latino-stereotypes_n_1877866.html

3

legislation to separate indigenous, blacks and whites (Wade, 1994). There are many historiographical

debates about this point. Whether desire, the lack of Spanish women during the first centuries, or necessity

of establishing control over the newly colonized territory through the creation of a mixed population, all

factors contribute to explaining the great process of mixing that occurred between the Spanish, the

indigenous population and slaves during colonial times. The fact that this process occurred has been

proven not only through the appearance of people, which constitutes the most obvious proof, but also by

historians and through genetic studies about Antioquia, where more than 90 percent of the population

descends from an indigenous/Amerindian woman (Carvajal-Carmona et al. 2000).

Jorge Andrés, student, participant of the “Maria de Salazar” collective action art project (by Jorge Restrepo, 2012)

Throughout the colonial era, mestizaje, or the mixing of race as perceived as a permanent threat in several

ways: biological, in terms of damaging “European purity” and racial hierarchy; through cultural syncretism,

as a threat against the mainstream Catholic tradition from Spain; and politically, due to the high number

and growing unrest among the mestizos of the colonies (Cunin, 2004). Racial categories during colonial

times (Virreinato de la Nueva Granada) included whites, the free of all colors (non-white free population),

indigenous peoples (pueblos indios) and slaves (Herrera, 2001). This categorization changed after

independence and during the 19th century, all Colombians, either whites or criollos, indigenous, zambos or

4

mulattoes, (and after the abolition of slaves the categorization came to include blacks) became

automatically mixed citizens. 5

The “Mestizo Myth” and racism without races

The “Mestizo Myth” became politically necessary for the new imaginary and the construction of the new

nation. The cult of the mestizo included what José Vasconcelos once called “The Cosmic Race” (or la Raza

Cósmica), a concept that defended the superiority of the hybrid race. As Manuel Gamio once wrote about

the role of the mestizo in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution: “On the giant anvil of the Andes, virile

races of Bronze and iron have struggled for centuries, from this struggle came the mestizo, the National

race, the carrier of the national culture of the Future” (Knight, 1990, p.85). Unlike the United States and

South Africa where racist ideology segregated racial groups by law and prohibited interracial marriage,

perhaps excluding the traditional elite, in Colombia or Brazil mixing was accepted, promoted after

independence. The interesting part of the mestizo myth, was that in addition to creating an anticolonial-

Spanish discourse, there was also the political will to take over the collective land property of indigenous

peoples under the Spanish colony and the Catholic Church.

After independence took place in 1821 and throughout the 19th century, racial categories disappeared,

giving way to “the ideology of the mixedness” (Wade, 1994). Until the new constitution of 1991, all racial

categories disappeared from national discourse, people‟s imaginary and public policies or interventions.

Some authors have called this (mostly referring to the case of Brazil) a racial democracy,6 referring to the

lack of racism and racial discrimination that took place due to the mixing of races, the absence of legal

discrimination, and a history of friendly relations between masters and slaves (Marx, 1998). The cases of

Colombia and Brazil were different since racism was characteristic of countries with specific laws

prohibiting mixed race marriages, mixed race schools and even mixed race neighborhoods, where racial

riots like South Africa‟s Apartheid and the Jim Crow Laws in the United States took place (Marx, 1998).

5 “Criollos” was the term for Spanish descendants born in the colonies, Zambos refers to the mix of black and indigenous and mulattoes refers to the mix of white and black. 6 Democracia Racial or Racial Democracy was first advanced by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in his work Casa-Grande & Senzala published in 1933, but has been widely used for scholars during the 20th century.

5

The truth is that the “Mestizo Myth” and the absence of racial categories or legal discrimination in Colombia

or in Brazil did not lead to less racial discrimination or increasing equality for minorities. Instead, this lead to

what Cunin (2004) called “racism without races”, where, although statistically and legally invisible, negative

color-based stereotypes, racial labels and signaling remained ingrained in the imaginary of the population.

There cannot be racial discrimination in a country where everybody is mixed. Brazilian scholar Florestan

Fernandes (1964) referred to this phenomenon as the “prejudice of having no prejudices”. Because the

State assumes the absence of racial prejudice, it fails to enforce laws to counter racial discrimination, as it

believes that such efforts are unnecessary.

The whitened mestizo

The ideology of white superiority that was inherited from the era of the Spanish colonization and imported

more recently by the western colonial experience in Africa during the 19th century, gave rise to the

“whitening ideology”. Racist ideologies such as this one considered necessary the whitening of the race

through the correct “breeding” of races to solve the “negro” problem (Skidmore, 1974).

In countries such as Brazil, whitening was a planned racial mixing policy with the purpose of minimizing the

non-white part of the population or to whiten the mixed one. By the end of the 19th century, Mexican,

Argentinean and Brazilian governments had established aggressive European migration policies in which

newcomers were given incentives to migrate by being granted free land or work. In countries like Colombia

the process was not through incentives granted by the government; instead, through increased immigration

from the Spanish regions of Galicia, Basque country or Asturias, many people started getting whiter after

several generations (Gonzalez Ochoa, 1960). This is specially the case of Antioquia, where most of my

family is originally from. In addition to the commonality of Basque last names, popular wisdom based on the

appearance of people in Antioquia created the myth that this area was a white region, where more than 80

percent of inhabitants were of European descent (Carvajal-Carmona et al. 2000).

As an example, created in 1895 by Modesto Brocco, the painting “Ham's Redemption” (Redenção de

Cam), graphically illustrates the whitening idea. Generation after generation, a family is becoming "whiter".

6

“Redenção de Cam”, Modesto Brocco (1895). Currently at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio De Janeiro (Oil on canvas).

The painting shows a black grandmother, a mulatto mother and a white baby. The older black woman is

praising God for the fact that her grandson is white. The title refers to an episode of the Bible in the book

7

Genesis where Ham dishonors Noah, his father. Noah pronounces a curse, stating that Ham‟s descendants

and that of his son Canaan will be "servants of servants". The curse was regularly interpreted as having

created visible racial characteristics in Ham's offspring, notably black skin (Sanders, 1969).

During the 19th century this was known as the “Hamitic Hypothesis”. It was widely used by Europeans to

legitimize slavery in the Americans and later in Africa as the latter was a result of “the divine punishment”

imposed on the descendants of Ham (Cam in Portuguese) (Sanders, 1969). If we return to the discussion

on the painting and we consider the “Hamitic Hypothesis”, it is possible to interpret that blacks were

punished to be slaves; therefore becoming white (or passing), was seen as a form of redemption. It is not

uncommon today to hear phrases such “we are improving the race” when someone of dark skin marries

someone with lighter skin. In our imaginary, whitening still equal improving.

Becoming “None of the Above”

This is the part where many pieces of the puzzle of my identity come together. I‟m a mixed race, but I look

white (so I pass for a European or White-Caucasian) and despite my awareness of “mixedness”, I still face

strong racial stereotypes that I constantly challenge.

The ideology of the “mixedness” in Colombia has been successful because it has become part of our

national ideology. An illustrating example is the case of the first African-Colombian politicians elected for

Congress in 2002 under negritudes/blackness racial affirmative action quotas. (Former athletes Maria

Isabel Urrutia and Welington Ortiz) defended their mixedness of denied the need to introduce

multiculturalism and affirmative action in higher education in Colombia (Cunin, 2003)7.

In Colombia, the constitution of 1991 included and for the first time recognized (some) ethnic categories:

Indigenous, Roma and several subgroups of African-Colombians such as Negro, Moreno (Dark),

Palenquero, Raizal8 and “none of the above”. The latter represents the category where all white and mixed

7 This contradiction could be the result of both, a stereotype of success and social mobility suggesting that successful Afro-Colombians are either musicians or athletes (and also whites or mixed) and their own self-identification as mixed. 8 Roma refers to people of gypsy descent; Palenquero refers to people and a creole language spoken by escaped slaves Maroons. Raizal refers to people afro-descents from Caribbean Islands of San Andres and Providencia.

8

races, as well as ethnic groups without any psychological, ethnic or physical affiliation could be grouped.

According to this constitution of 1991, I was identified under “none of the above”.

Along with the new ethnic categories, also came multicultural laws giving special rights to minorities in

terms of education, collective land ownership and affirmative action in government and education (Cunin,

2004). A study about multiculturalism in the Caribbean coast of Colombia revealed that ethnically black

African descendants identified themselves as mixed, and suggested that blacks were only located in

Palenques/Maroons, which is on the Pacific Coast. It has already taken 20 years for African-Colombian

movements to convince this group to identify themselves (during the Census and other surveys) as Afro-

Colombians. While the census for 2005 revealed that only 10 percent of the Colombian population

identified themselves as any of the African Colombian categories, estimations revealed that this population

was in fact as high as 25 to 30 percent (Estupiñán, 2006).

We are all from East Africa

Passing so easily across identities and ethnicities made me wonder about my genetic heritage. I am not

only mixed, “none of the above”, and White-Caucasian (or what other people perceive about physical

features); I am also the result of thousands of years of migration and evolution. Thanks to an anonymous

saliva sample sent to the Genographic Project from National Geographic I finally had scientific evidence of

my maternal indigenous lineage.9 Even more powerful evidence came from results that indicated the route

of migration of my ancestors: they left East Africa, which means that at some point in time, my ancestors

(and all of our ancestors) were black.

Some years ago, I met a person from China on a flight from New York to Brazil. For some reason our

conversation landed on the topic of Mitochondrial DNA and we realized that we both belonged to genetic

Haplogroup A (Sykes, 2003). This basically means that we descended from common ancestors in Asia that

separated when mine crossed the Bearing Strait into Alaska and then migrated further south along the

continent. The map below shows my Mitochondrial DNA test and the Migration Routes taken by my

ancestors out of Africa 150.000 years ago, starting, within the territory known today as Ethiopia and Kenya.

The Map also shows the different genetic mutations, as a result of adaptation, to local climate changes

9 Human mitochondrial DNA Haplogroup. see Sykes (2003)

9

(from L1, to L2, L3, N and then A Haplogroups). Studies suggest that genetic mutations such as lighter

skin, softer and lighter hair could have taken about 20.000 years to develop, particularly as a result to the

exposure of the last glaciations period (Sykes, 2003).

Mitochondrial DNA Test, Genographic Project, National Geographic

Note: Genoma Project Mitocondrial DNA Test – Susana Martinez Restrepo taken in 2010

My Haplogroup A is believed to have started in East Siberia as a result of a genetic mutation and today it

constitutes the most common group in East Asia, among Eskimos, eight percent of Japanese and most

ethnic groups of Central and South America. Although it seems that “passing” is my thing, I definitely do not

look Chinese, Eskimo, or Native American. Nevertheless, in an imaginary world ruled by geneticists‟ and

with only DNA categories, most of my family and I, Eskimos, Chinese and Native Americans and

Colombian Indigenous would have to mark “X” under the same survey box.

10

Conclusion

The mixedness, or mestizaje, as well as the social (colonial) construction of history had deeply affected

how I perceive myself and how others perceive me. However, identity and ethnicity also change according

to locations; and in my case, even during the different seasons of the year. “Passing” across ethnicities and

identities is easy simply because ethnic categories are social and historical constructions often used to

classify the “other”, the different and the unknown. For people like me or for most members of my family,

passing is easy because we got whiter. In addition to my Amerindian Mitochondrial DNA, our family has a

long genealogy of showing a long process of mixing, not only with indigenous but also with Sephardic Jews

and Non-Spanish Europeans.

Dana, educator, participant of the “Maria de Salazar” collective action art project (by Jorge Restrepo, 2013).

While during the construction of nations-states in 19th century Europe, Jews were once considered the

“other” (Sand, 2011), today they are considered white both in Europe and in the United States. In Israel,

Arabs are currently the “other and the enemy”, when only 60 years ago they were the masters of their own

land. Mexicans, once inhabitants of today‟s California, Texas and New Mexico were defined during the 19 th

century first as white, then as Chicanos for finally becoming Hispanics/Latinos for ethnic classification

purposes of the United States. Even Irish and Italian immigrants in the United States were once considered

11

a separate (and discriminated) minority. The Hutus and Tutsis killed each other during Rwanda‟s genocide

in 1994 in part as a result of hatred, discrimination and hierarchies created by racial categories established

during the Belgium colonial times (Mandani, 2001).

The genetic truth is that we all left (and stayed in) Africa about 50.000 years ago. My ancestors travelled

out of Africa, became what today is known as Amerindian/Indigenous, got mixed with Spanish and lighter

on a (most likely) racist effort to whiten up10. But let‟s not fool ourselves; the reality is that we all come from

Africa! And for you, in your country, based on your own social (colonial) construction of history, perception

and stereotypes, whom do I pass for?

References

Carvajal-Carmona, L.G, et al. (2000), Strong Amerind/White Sex Bias and a Possible Sephardic

Contribution among the Founders of a Population in Northwest Colombia.

Cunin, E. (2004), Identidades a flor de piel. Lo ‟negro‟ entre apariencias y pertenencias: mestizaje y

categorías raciales en Cartagena (Colombia), Bogotá: IFEA-ICANH-Uniandes-Observatorio del

Caribe Colombiano, 2003.

Cunin E, (2003), La politique ethnique entre altérité et stéréotype. Regards sur les élections de mars 2002

en Colombie", Problèmes d‟Amérique Latine, n° 48, printemps.

Estupiñán, J.P (2006), Afro Colombianos y el Censo de 2005: Elementos preliminares para el análisis del

proceso censal con la población afro Colombiana. La Revista del Centro Andino de Altos Estudios,

CANDANE N 1, Bogotá – Colombia.

Fernandes, F. (1964) A integração do negro na sociedade de classes: estudo das relações raciais no

Brasil, Sao Paulo, Dominus Editora e editora da USP.

10 Note by Jorge Restrepo: Susana Martinez is a descendant of Maria de Salazar.

12

Freyre, G. (1933) Casa Grande & Senzala: formação da família brasileira sob o regime de economia

patriarcal. Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Schmidt.

González Ochoa, 1960). La Raza Antioqueña. In El pueblo Antioqueño. Medellín, Universidad de

Antioquia.

Haslip-Viera, G. & Baver, S. L Eds. (1997), Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, University

Notre Dame Press.

Herrera Avila, M. (2001), Las divisiones político-administrativas del virreinato de la Nueva Granada a

finales del período colonial, Historia Crítica N 22, 2001

Knight, A. (1990). Racism, revolution and indigenismo: Mexico 1910-1940. In the Idea of Race in Latin

America, 1970-1940, Graham, R (ed.), 70-113. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Marx, A (1998), Making the Race and the Nation: a Comparison of the United States, South Africa and

Brazil. Cambridge University Press.

Mamdani, M. (2001) When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda,

Princeton.

Sand, S. (2010), Comment le people juif fut inventé, Champs Essais.

Sanders, E. R. (1969), The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective," Journal of

African History, 10 (1969), 521-532.

Skidmore, T. (1974), Black Into White Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, Oxford University Press,

New York.

Sykes, B (2003). Mitochondrial DNA and human history. The Human Genome. Wellcome Trust. Retrieved

5 February 2012.

13

Wade, P (1994), Representation and power of Black Colombians, IN Social Construction of the Past:

representation as power. Ed George Bond and Angela Gilliam.