Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000

TWO: Creoles and Color

TWO h Creoles and Color Caribbean identity is built on both mestizo and mulatto mixture. While Mexican usage of mestizaje often elides the Africanist presence, this presence is more visible in the racial makeup of the Caribbean. In defining her Puerto Rican–American identity, Rosario Morales includes “the ebony sheen to my life,” “the sound of african in english” (Levins Morales and Morales 56–57). She affirms “The Other Heritage” within her mestizaje: “I was just right just me just brown and pink and full of drums inside beating rhythm for my feet” (58). As she says in another poem, “Africa,” “Though my roots reach into the soils of two Americas / Africa waters my tree” (55). She reminds us of the racial, national, linguistic, and cultural legacy of Africa in all of the Americas and celebrates the brown, the pink, and the black. This Caribbean mixture bridges the two American race paradigms discussed in chapter 1, pairing the mediating mixture of mestizaje with a blackto -white racial spectrum. Moreover, it transcends racial categories to include an overt mixture of nations, languages, and color. This chapter analyzes histories, theories, and representations of Caribbean race dynamics , which often romanticize the islands as a place of uncomplicated fluidity. I retain that sense of fluidity insofar as it redefines race identity as a complex product of color, class, education, and other social factors rather than a fixed essence but temper the idealized image of the Caribbean [88] Creoles and Color 89 with an analysis of the persistence of color hierarchies. The complexities of Caribbean identity, although often opposed to U.S. race dynamics, offer many insights regarding the construction of racialized identities in general and American identities in particular.1 Martinican poet and critic Edouard Glissant celebrates the “new,” “open” identities of the Creole Caribbean, which subvert the “old and rigid sense of identity” (“Creolization” 274). In the Caribbean context, Creole literally means island-born (as opposed to European-born), but the term also connotes mixed race. Since mixture occurred so frequently on the islands, Creole is opposed to supposedly pure and rigid European identities.2 I regard these open, “impure” identities as emblematic of the mixture that has defined all of the Americas for centuries. Glissant claims that our views of civilization have been transformed “from the all-encompassing world of cultural Sameness, effectively imposed by the West, to a pattern of fragmented Diversity” achieved by peoples in resistance (Discourse 97). This “Diversity,” which Glissant attributes to the Caribbean, is cross-cultural, antiuniversalist, antiessentialist, and dynamic, unlike the sublimation of difference established by “expansionist plunder” from “the West” (98, 253). In addition to the geographic opposition between the West and the Caribbean, Glissant also builds a theoretical opposition between universal essence and fragmented difference that coincides with a temporal opposition between the past of colonial domination and the Creolized, diversified present. The frequency of mixture in the early history of the Caribbean, however, suggests that this challenge to universal essence is long-standing, not a product of contemporary postcolonialism. The qualities that have empowered the islands ’ challenge to imperialist domination—geographic, racial, national, and linguistic heterogeneity—support postcolonial theories with a history of effective political resistance, breaking down Glissant’s opposition between colonial history and contemporary antiessentialism. According to Barbara Christian, “Ethnic and African American Studies in the United States are, in a sense, just beginning to catch up with the complexities of the very concept of identity, complexities acknowledged by Caribbean peoples, for in that region identity is seldom characterized by a simple or single label” (“Rough Terrain” 258). In the Caribbean , although Europeans have been the dominant, colonizing force, they do not constitute a majority. Furthermore, the mixture of peoples of African, British, French, Dutch, Spanish, East Indian, and indigenous 90 Mulattas and Mestizas descent in the close quarters of the Caribbean islands has absolutely decentered white and black as pure and polarized racial categories. Unlike the racial history of the southeastern United States, no amount of literary or scientific mythology could support an illusion of binary racialization. Although racial and racist hierarchies dominate Caribbean history, the uncertainty of racial differentiation based on skin color alone has created a social structure in which other characteristics such as class, language , cultural practices, and beliefs have come to signify race as much as color. While the planter aristocracy in the southeastern United States was de...