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

ONE: Mulattas and Mestizas

ONE h Mulattas and Mestizas Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow describes the origins of Thomasina Moore’s uncertain racial identity: “He forced my mother / late / one night. / What do they call me?” (19). Her light skin enables her to pass and to perform in the chorus line at the Cotton Club. “She had the color that qualified” (19). She moves fluidly from the white cultural realm of nightclubs and cruise ships to the African-American cultural realm of “snakehips” and Harlem dance halls (26). Yet her color does more than give her access to these performances of privilege. Marshall inserts this question into her narrative about Thomasina’s symbolic complexion. The dancer’s “near-white of a blanched almond” skin (19) tells a story of both privilege and rape. Marshall describes Thomasina’s color as dual—not only racially dual but socially dual as well. Her light skin is “both sacred—for wasn’t it a witness?—and profane” (19). Witness to what? Perhaps color bears witness to one’s status in the hierarchy of the chosen or the damned. Or maybe it testifies to past profanity, the corruption of racial purity or the sexual violation of a black woman by a white man. Thomasina’s access to the upper echelons of the color hierarchy, the “sacred” aspect, was produced in the traditional scenario of the white man’s access to the black woman’s body, the “profane” aspect. Her mixed race also bears witness to the decentering of racial hierarchies that occurs when the white man crosses the color line and leaves offspring on both sides. Thomasina’s [18] Mulattas and Mestizas 19 skin reflects the admixture of the violator and the violated and embodies both sides of the racial power imbalance that enables the mobility and the transgressions of light-skinned people. As a product of her duality, Thomasina transcends the limitations of any single racial identification, but she cannot escape the haunting origins of her identity. The simultaneous violation and privilege surrounding the mulatto re- flects the historical and cultural variations in biracial signification, ranging from scapegoating biracial subjects as traitors to their “true” races to celebrating biracial subjects as race leaders or representatives of racial transcendence . I would suggest that the ambiguous position of the biracial subject confounds any sense of “truth” in racial identity, recasting race as an uncertain and shifting field of differences: “What do they call me?” Americans have been asking for centuries what to call biracial individuals , fearful of the often ominous history inscribed in their mixture and the unsettling of racial differentiation that they represent. The need to ask and the fear of asking reflect a loss of racial definition and a lost sense of origins, yet Thomasina learns to turn to her advantage this loss and the tragedy of the scenario that produced it. Just as biracialism leads African-American writers to think about the nature of racial identity, contemporary work by Chicana/o writers often centers on the issue of racial mixture. Being Chicana/o by definition means belonging to more than one race: Spanish, Native American, and often African- and Anglo-American, too. Mestizaje originally was the Latin American term for the racial and cultural fusion produced by the conquest and the colonial domination of the so-called New World, in which European colonizers mixed with the darker-skinned colonized subjects. In different regions of the Americas, mestizaje refers to different histories of mixture and different degrees of stigma or valorization. Recently, mestizaje has been celebrated as a marker of intercultural identification in general. Mestizaje describes the product of mixture while invoking its origins. The term returns us to centuries-old history—conquest, rape, slavery, and cultural imperialism—as well as turning us toward new configurations of identity for the future. Chicana feminists Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga imagine mestiza identity as a radical incorporation of differences, a fluid shifting between languages, races, nations, and cultures. Mestizaje thus bridges narratives from America’s past with contemporary academic rhetoric about identity. Mestizaje rests on a “foundation” of multiple, shifting components yet remains attached to history, cultural specificity, and a powerful politics of resistance, unlike many nonfoundational theories of 20 Mulattas and Mestizas identity that are inhibited by abstraction.1 Mestizaje often transcends its potentially tragic origins (conquest, rape, “the death of...