May 12, 2011
Black in Latin America
We’ve seen a few episodes from Henry Gates’ excellent series Black in Latin America. The episode on The Dominican Republic and Haiti was especially fascinating, as you have a microcosm of evolutionary pressures present in such a small space. All the episodes are available online.
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I’m going to watch that episode and probably more.
Speaking of Caribbean microcosms, the one and only “all-inclusive” resort-y vacation (think land-based cruise ship) I ever went on was to a resort in the Dominican Republic. The prospect was just about 180° from my usual way of traveling, but I thought I’d give it a shot.
I was very unhappy much of the time. I stuck with the program, as I’d paid for it, and to have bailed out and gone off on my own would have cost additional money I didn’t have. Besides, I was curious.
The resort was on land that had once been part of a sugar plantation. As I recall, it was a Fanjul family property.
I had a distinct sense of being in a vaguely sinister “gated community.” I remember sitting out on the veranda one night, gazing out at the sea, and seeing something weird going down with Resort Security and some dude scrabbling around a patch of wind-blown vegetation.
The whole time I was there (a week?) I felt claustrophobic. So I rented a bike. One evening I biked to what was billed as a restaurant/shopping/gallery district within the confines of the enormous resort. It was virtually deserted and felt like a set from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
I also biked to a nearby polo ground, where I stood on the road and spent a couple of hours watching a game.
One afternoon I sat on the veranda and hallucinated. I saw the ground around our rented cottage soaked in blood.
And anyone with eyes to see could not fail to notice that the men and women at the front desk had café au lait complexions. Those who cleaned the toilets were dark-skinned. They were Haitian.
I’m curious Shiela, how you knew they were Haitian? Many Dominicans, sadly none in my family are very dark-skinned and are only partially Haitian and would never admit it even if it were true.
So far I’ve only watched the Hispañola and Cuban episodes. I thought they were as thorough as my schooling on the subject. It’s definitely a must watch for Americans.
The few clips I caught of the Mexican episode were so fascinating. I think in part because Mexicans are an ever present population of NYC (today versus 20 years ago) and I’ve always considered Puerto Ricans the largest Spanish speaking brown group here. Mexican culture is just so different from ours. There was a guide who told Gates that the dropping of d’s from words and dropping the final s (Just as we drop the g from ing.) is an African trait. That was fascinating because those are prominent linguistic features of the Canary island accent. (Not dialect, you’d still write out words but pronounce them differently.) As I understand the Canary Islands are off the coast of African but in the context of the series he meant African as in mainland, black-skinned African.
At any rate, Sheila your story summarizes why I’ll never visit DR or my family down there. That island has issues that may never go away.
Good question, Lex. The people told me. We were talking, and they said.
Oh, one more thing: HAIR! The topic of race in Hispañola is such a hot issue that many Dominicans and African Americans wondered why the documentary Good Hair didn’t interview any Dominican stylists (who are renowned at taming curls, frizz and kink)? The answer quite simply is that Domincans in the US are way more likely to call themselves Black. But back home they’d have a miriad of words to use in it’s place.
One well written blog from a dark-skinned Dominican’s point of view is called Live Above Mediocrity. I often find myself not relating to his Dominican upbringing and it is directly related to our racial background. The same could be said in the US though, maybe to a lesser degree.
People tell me things. I don’t know why. (They also ask directions.) I almost never ask. I just get talking, and man, do they get telling.
I will definitely watch the Mexican episode, too. I grew up in Texas, and I’ve spent most of my adult life in Chicago — second-largest Mexican-American population in the US. Just behind LA.
Weird Texas memory: Anglos applying the word “Spanish” to people of Mexican origin. Not “Spanish-speaking.” “Spanish.”
But I’m drifting from the topic of “Black in Latin America.”
At some point I’m going to run out of material… Another interesting point: Gates noted that after the fall of Batista in Cuba there was white-flight. Around 60-70% of the Cubans living in the States are light-skinned. So, it’s no wonder that many Americans think this is a bizarre issue. That statistic probably applies to most Latin Americans living here, too. When Americans think of brown Hispanics they immediately think Mexican but it’s more complex and that’s the point Gates makes.
Also Sheila, I have plenty more culture shock stories to share. My cousin who’s also a light Dominican spent her summers there both in hotels and with family.
Shiela, I’d love to hear more! If only non Hispanic Texans and Mexicans knew how much they have in common. The one dividing trait: assimilation.
Lex, when we meet, we’ll swap stories. When my 93-year-old mother died in Dallas in 2009, she was the last of a bunch of post-WWII Connecticut transplants who lived in the neighborhood where I grew up. Many English-Scots-Irish. Plus Germans and other Northern Europeans. And Italians. Employees of a large aircraft manufacturer that transferred a lot of people to Texas after the war.
Years before she died (the last of the old widow ladies), the whole neighborhood was Mexican-American. She was the last old Connecticut Yankee for blocks around.
To her dying day, she spoke of New England as “home,” though she’d lived in Texas for more than two-thirds of her life.
Assimilation. Or not. Yep.
I absolutely love this stuff! Lex, your stories, Shelia’s, all of it. My relatives claimed they had no idea where the ancestors came from. I had to dig. French name, changed from lieu to lew. Irish ancestry alluded to although when I pressed my father insisted that we came from “North Carolina.” So, I said, American Indian? Absolutely not. Which was a fib and I was thrilled to find out as an adult that I am 1/32 Cherokee from Miss Nell’s side.
I worked with a woman from Puerto Rico who had very pale skin and dark brown hair. Her cousin had skin that looked slightly tanned, maybe. Both just lovely. The co-worker said her cousin was made fun of as a child “for her dark skin.” I said “she’s not dark.” But the co-worker said that was just the way it was. And the self-described Creoles in New Orleans? Some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen. I mean, being shallow here, of course. But I can’t help but notice.
Oh, another co-worker on the Latin American desk, as they called it — blue eyes, blonde, very pale skin, accent no one could figure out. He was born and raised in Venezuela by German parents who arrived there in the 1940s. Ah ha!
Sorry to go crazy about this. But the people on the “Latam” desk were the ones who told me about Americana, Brazil, where “confederados” abandoned the American South between the 1820s and the late 1920s. Emperor Dom Pedro II wanted them to bring cotton-planting expertise to the country. So, by the late 1860s, several thousand Southerners showed up.
Even now, they celebrate their heritage. Hundreds of people with names like Jones, Pyles and Steagall converge every year on a secluded cemetery to throw a party with fried chicken, biscuits, corn bread, candied apples and banjo music. And Confederate flags, of course.
It was great when, on the way back to Chicago from a Utah hiking trip, one of my companions said she could never live in Utah, that it would be really weird to live in a state with so few black people. Later that night someone else commented to me that our friend sure must have an advanced case of social awareness.
Actually, she may have, but she was thinking personally when she said what she said. She was one of eleven children of African-American parents. Their skin tones ranged from that of a brother who was very very dark — to hers. And ahe was as pasty-faced as me — and as her name was Maureen, many people guessed her background was Irish (just as they do with me).
I told her what our other friend had said, and her take was that she found it funny that so many people thought that human beings (or any living creatures, really) were like buckets of paint or cups of coffee — that there was some kind of uniform “dilution” principle at work.
Anyway, apart from that, if you read just a little about mitochondrial DNA, you’ll realize that we’re all related. If you didn’t already know.
Also, Carole — oh, yeah. That blue-eyed blonde Venezuelan thing. I know some of those folks.
I could go on and on about this stuff.
So maybe we need to connect up and go to New York and jaw with Lex.
That sounds like fun. I know we’d both like to see Lucy too.
And there’s India! And all manner of wonders.
Okay. Time to look at the Megabus prices and schedules.