Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico. By Ileana Rodríguez-Silva. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. vii, 320. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00 cloth (original) (raw)

Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico

Centro Journal, 2014

Lohse argues that these diverse origins, alongside the infrequent number of slave arrivals direct from Africa, the low-density geographical concentration of slavery, and the close contacts of Africans with European, Amerindians, and their mixed progeny led Africans and their descendants in this region to create collective identities based on overlapping sources: African, indigenous, European, and combinations thereof. By the mid-seventeenth century most of the slave population in Costa Rica was nativeborn, as was true in slightly different periods of colonial Oaxaca and Guatemala, and inland regions of New Granada and the Río de la Plata. Further comparisons will reveal whether these patterns were replicated across the Spanish Americas.

The Paradox of the Puerto Rican Race: The Interplay of Racism and Nationalism under U.S. Colonialism Chapter Author(s

Twenty-First Century Color Lines: Multiracial Change in Contemporary America, 2009

The aim of this chapter is to offer an interpretation of the seemingly contra- dictory results of the combined information of the 2000 U.S. Census data for Puerto Rico and the results of the 2003 University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, Racial Classification Study (UPRM Study). On the 2000 U.S. Cen- sus, 80.5 percent of Puerto Ricans classified themselves as White, while 15.4 percent considered themselves either Black, African American, American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, or some other race. Three years later, as part of the UPRM Study, only 45.9 percent chose to classify themselves as White, while 30.6 percent declined the use of the binary code (Black and White) for racial self-classification. Moreover, in the same study 78.5 percent of the population asserted the existence of a complete encompassing Puerto Rican race, with almost identical results among those who classified themselves as White, Black or those who rejected the binary code (80 percent, 83 percent, and 81 percent, respectively). We have named the contrast between these results “the paradox of the Puerto Rican Race,” a term also used by Duany (2003). We contend that the perception of paradoxical results is based on a perspective that takes racial ascriptions to be a descriptive language game with relatively stable referents and not, as we believe, a strategic language game deployed in a broader scenario of political and social conflict. To explain away the paradox and propose an alternative reading and a better interpretation of the “color lines” in the Puerto Rican context we emphasize: (1) the relational and strategic aspects of ethnic/racial ascriptions;1 (2) the broader political context in which those ascriptions are deployed; and (3) their ability to express non-racial aspirations and conflicts. Chapter Author(s): Anayra O. Santory-Jorge, Luis A. Avilés, Juan Carlos Martínez- Cruzado and Doris Ramírez

From Carolina to Loíza: Race, Place, and Puerto Rican Racial Democracy

This article considers the entanglements of race, culture and place in Puerto Rico. I analyse two distinct constructions of blackness that sustain racial hierarchies intrinsic to Puerto Rican 'racial democracy'. First, 'folkloric blackness' is a static, historicised version of blackness that represents Puerto Rico's African heritage without compromising the whitening bias of racial democracy discourse. A second construction of blackness that I term 'urban blackness' also circulates throughout the island, but instead serves as the counterpoint to the rest of the presumably 'whiter' Puerto Rico. Both have been emplaced within distinct, bounded locations, and affiliated with certain cultural practices. I argue that these 'emplacements' that arise from the associations between race, culture and place produce specific constructions of blackness that appear contradictory, yet ultimately work together to maintain the racial hierarchies intrinsic to racial democracy discourses.

Nonsovereign Racecraft: How Colonialism, Debt, and Disaster are Transforming Puerto Rican Racial Subjectivities

American Anthropologist, 2021

Using the concept of "racecraft" to describe the state production of racial subjectivities, we argue that this process has been increasingly compromised in Puerto Rico by a lack of sovereignty and by the current socioeconomic crisis. We argue that the state-sponsored idea that Puerto Rican white and mixed-race identities operate separately from the US racial framework is receding. Based on the unconventional use of an open-ended question for racial identification in a survey administered to over one thousand Puerto Ricans, we found: a reluctance to identify racially, an awareness of a normative "whiteness" that excludes Puerto Ricans, and a tendency to embrace US federal categories such as "Hispanic" and "Latino." We interpret these results as evidence of a Puerto Rican racial

Possible republics : tracing the 'entanglements' of race and nation in Afro-Latina/o Caribbean thought and activism, 1870-1930

2012

This dissertations challenges how critical scholarship on race and racism in Latin America has traditionally understood racial subalterns in Cuba and Puerto Rico as people who are prevented from acting as black political subjects because of the hegemonic power of discourses of nationhood premised on ideas of mestizaje and racial fraternity. By providing an intellectual history of several important yet largely ignored Cuban and Puerto Rican activists intellectuals of color who lived and worked between the Caribbean and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, I show that instead of being tricked by creole elite national narratives, they attempted to redefine ideas of nationhood to challenge racism, colonialism, and imperialism at local, national, and transnational levels. More specifically, through an examination of the essays, newspaper articles, personal correspondence, and literary works they left behind, I look at the complicated ways in which figures such as Rafael Serra, Tomas...