The Hidden History of Mestizo America

Abstract

On a dank January evening in London in 1617, the audience was distracted from a performance of Ben Johnson's The Vision of Delight by the persons sitting next to King James I and Queen Anne: a dashing adventurer who had just returned from the outer edge of the fledgling English empire and his new wife, ten years his junior. The king's guests were John Rolfe and his wife Rebecca -a name newly invented to anglicize the daughter of another king who ruled over a domain as big and populous as a north English county. She was Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan.' The first recorded interracial marriage in American history had taken place because Rebecca's father and the English leaders in the colony of Virginia were eager to bring about a detente after a decade of abrasive and sometimes bloody European-Algonkian contact on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The Rolfe-Pocahontas marriage might have become the embryo of a mestizo United States.2 I use the term mestizo in the original sense referring to racial intermixture of all kinds. In the early seventeenth century, negative ideas about miscegenation had hardly formed; indeed, the word itself did not appear for another two and a half centuries. King James was not worried about interracial marriage. He fretted only about whether a commoner such as Rolfe was entitled