Beyond Black and Red: African–Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, and: To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals (review)

Abstract

Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America. Edited by Matthew Restall. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 303. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $45.00; Paper, $22.95.)To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in United States from Earliest Times to Indian Removals. By Thomas N. Ingersoll. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Pp. xxi, 450. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95.)Reviewed by Bruce DainAmong sophisticated scholars, racism is no longer much of a thing. Racism, that is, is no longer treated as a potent entity in its own right, kind of thing that can cause or shape behavior in some easily determined way. Notions of racism as a kind of monolith or juggernaut derive in part from sources used by first generation of modern antiracist scholars, who mostly examined material written by or for elite whites and exposed vast common prejudices therein. The racism monolith crumbles, however, when scholarly attention turns to ordinary folk, white and nonwhite. Especially revealing is evidence surrounding mixing between whites and nonwhites, perhaps ultimate act of racial transgression. In place of racism writ large, complex cross-racial stories and models emerge, stories and models that encompass both nonwhite agency and white power and prejudice. The Restall collection and Ingersoll's book are both outstanding examples of this current vogue for studying hybridity and identity on margins.The nine articles assembled in Beyond Black and Red debunk hallowed idea of an unremitting hostility between Indians and Africans in colonial Latin America. This idea becomes largely a myth promoted by colonial administrators and other intent on a strategy of divide-and-conquer. Study of black-Indian interaction reveals instead that racial identity was highly localized throughout colonial Latin America and rarely if ever conformed entirely to European preconceptions or desires. Indeed, larger racial categories such as Indian and black either had no meaning at local community level, and hence little resonance with ordinary folk, or big categories ascribed a more local meaning than that intended by Europeans (10). Identity, that is, was informal (as opposed to racial formalism increasingly advocated by whites) and never reflected anything like a simple process of white domination. There could be blatant manipulation, as when a woman accused of being a mulata sorceress tried to prove that she was an Indian to avoid jurisdiction of Inquisition (which associated mulatas and witchcraft). Or on further study, seeming racial fears of blacks as criminal wolves preying on native Maya sheep in Guatemala and Yucatan resolve into rural fears of exploitive and sometimes black city-dwelling traders and middlemen-a pattern revealing less of unremitting hostility than opposite: the intensification of interaction between two groups and gradual breakdown of barriers between them (213). Over time, as interaction between natives and blacks intensified, identities became more complex and neat racial categories became harder and harder to maintain or impose, yielding frustration, fear, and backlash on part of colonial authorities and elites. These fears escalated to point that Spanish authorities in Mexico tried to use systema de castas as a form of racial apartheid to separate Spanish, mixed bloods, Indians, and blacks.In To Intermix with Our White Brothers, Ingersoll similarly demonstrates that on margins of American society and settlement there was extensive mixing between Indians and whites, dramatically more than most elite-minded white sources ever acknowledged. If European racial discrimination was rigid and unchanging, on-the-ground colonial interracial practices were local and situational (9). Colonists who aspired to respectability scorned mixture with Indians and tried to uphold an image of America as a place where could keep their bloodlines pure and nonwhites and poor knew their station. …