Tainos in the DR?

[Baracutay]

Originally Posted by A.Hidalgo

Very interesting article. I see that the author has acknowledge the Haitian angle for the usage of the Indio racial category in the Dominican Republic.

Very interesting article indeed. However I find that the African-American students in this article adhere to the notion that if you have one drop of black blood you are automatically black. This idea which arose during slavery in the US is very different in the DR where officially we see ourselves as white just because we all (supposedly) have white blood. The usage of the word mulato is not to acknowledge that we all have African ancestry in my opinion, but rather that we all have white blood and in essence we are white.
The Taino question is only now being answered. I find that most academics keep perpetuating what has already been written on the Indian in the DR.And always based on the assumption that the Indian was "totally annihilated" during the colonial period.
My experience in the USA during my childhood was one where my school teachers from the 1st grade to the sixth all assumed that I was Indian based on my features. But when the asked me where I was from and I mentioned that I was from the DR , I automatically became a curiously looking black person! Again all this based on the "fact that there is no Indian heritage in the DR. Luckily do to genetcs, linguistics and revisionist history we know that the Taino is very much a part of the mix in the DR and most be acknowledged as well.
Baracutei

[Ricardo900]

Yes the one drop is embedded in American society, even today it's pretty much an unwritten rule. Dominicans do run into this problem when they immigrate here and just because they are light, they are still classified as being non-white and the brown complexioned or indio Dominicans are labeled Black. It's a rude awakening for many. During colonial times they even created the terms Quintroon(5th Gen. Black) and even the Hexadecaroon( one 16th Black) wow!! That means if you have blond hair and blue eyes but your great, great, great, great grandmother was black, guess what?

I think its always prudent to question so-called history, since many of it probably was written with an underlying agenda. A classic movie called "Pinky" reflects the Identity-trouble light-skinned blacks who were able to pass for whites in the US. Pinky (1949)

[NALs]

Originally Posted by Baracutay

...I find that the African-American students in this article adhere to the notion that if you have one drop of black blood you are automatically black.
Baracutei

To further expand on what Baracutei has said, here are a few interesting links:

Black, White or What?

One-drop rule a part of racist past

'One-drop rule' persists but faces unprecedented challenges

Interesting forum regarding this and other issues

-NALs

[Baracutay]

Originally Posted by NALs

To further expand on what Baracutei has said, here are a few interesting links:

Black, White or What?

One-drop rule a part of racist past

'One-drop rule' persists but faces unprecedented challenges

Interesting forum regarding this and other issues

-NALs

GREAT POST NALS!!!! As soon as I get a chance I am going to read through the posts on the other forum. They look extremely interesting.
Thank you
Baracutei

[ElNegrote]

Originally Posted by Ricardo900

Yes the one drop is embedded in American society, even today it's pretty much an unwritten rule. Dominicans do run into this problem when they immigrate here and just because they are light, they are still classified as being non-white and the brown complexioned or indio Dominicans are labeled Black. It's a rude awakening for many. During colonial times they even created the terms Quintroon(5th Gen. Black) and even the Hexadecaroon( one 16th Black) wow!! That means if you have blond hair and blue eyes but your great, great, great, great grandmother was black, guess what?

The two most common terms, used in primarily in parts of Louisiana and the lower south, were quadroon (1/4th=>cuatro=>quatuor=four) and octaroon (1/8th=>octo=>octo=>8). There were quadroon and octaroon balls, at which women supposedly carrying these racial breakdowns were brought for selection by wealthy White men. Again, who devised all this racial categorization? It wasn't the Blacks...or the Native peoples.

I think its always prudent to question so-called history, since many of it probably was written with an underlying agenda. A classic movie called "Pinky" reflects the Identity-trouble light-skinned blacks who were able to pass for whites in the US. Pinky (1949)

Even before "Pinky," there was Fanny Hurst's "Imitation of Life" (1934), with Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers, and Fredi Washington, and featuring the infamous phrase, "Once a pancake, always a pancake." It was later remade in 1959 as a well-known melodrama by the famous director Douglas Sirk, starring Sandra Dee, Lana Turner, and Susan Kohner as the "mixed-raced" girl. It's fascinating to see this film and recognize that it appeared in theaters just half a decade after Brown v. Board of Education and just as thethe Civil Rights movement was taking off.

BTW, film studies and African American studies have looked extensively at narratives of the "tragic mulatto"/"mulata," which Hollywood and American popular culture revisited again and again.

[ElNegrote]

Originally Posted by NALs

To further expand on what Baracutei has said, here are a few interesting links:

Black, White or What?

One-drop rule a part of racist past

'One-drop rule' persists but faces unprecedented challenges

Interesting forum regarding this and other issues

-NALs

But the "one drop" rule has always been a misnomer, as there have been mixed-raced people passing as White who were legally certified as such and thus did not count themselves as Black nor were counted as such by the US federal government or states. Given that some states like Ohio required non-Whites to post a prohibitive bond to immigrate there and others like Oregon outright banned Blacks from immigrating as part of their constitutions, it makes sense that some settlers to these areas who were of mixed-race ancestry would pass as White and thus avoid legal sanctions as well as social ones.

Also, when genetic tests identified the descendants of Sally Hemings, the young enslaved woman who bore Thomas Jefferson's children, some of the descendants were "White" Americans living across the US. One set of descendants, siblings whose last name was Westerainens (the name is Finnish, I believe), acknowledged their descent, primarily from Jefferson but also from Hemings, but also did not forsake their "Whiteness," which in any case is always a social construction and in the US and elsewhere, is socially produced, as opposed to being a biological fact. There are other White Americans--Adrian M. S. Piper suggested years ago that the number might be between 17%-30% depending upon the region--with direct African ancestry and even staged a performance piece with cards indicating this that she--who can easily pass for White--handed out to unsuspecting Whites, many became VERY agitated.

But again, I ask, who came up with all this categorizing crap in the first place? Who set out to divide people by racial categories that changed as the centuries changed, with people from one continent--Europeans--always being on top? Twas'nt the Africans nor the Taínos, Iroquois, Sioux, etc.

[ElNegrote]

Originally Posted by Chip

You are only reiterating what I stated when I said the the US "dynamic" is very, very broken - and it is for a variety of reasons, as you noted above.

Uh no, I'm not reiterating anything you said. Reread what you wrote. There are leagues of difference from what I'm posting and what you're saying. Really.

My mentioning the US was merely as a reference to show how superior the DR is in regards to racial relations. No matter what people may think, Mulato has no negative connotation in the DR, in the US yes, in the DR no - just like gringo for that matter. Dominicans call me that all the time. A lot of times when I place an order over the phone for something to be delivered to the house, I tell them if they get lost stop at the local colmado and ask for the gringo who lives close by. They don't even bat an eye bercasue to them it is JUST a descriptive term like mulato, that is all.

Let me ask, are you a White person? Just wondering. "Racial relations" in the DR are different from the US, not "superior." When an overtly Black man ran for the presidency in 2002 and 2004, the popular and beloved José Francisco Peña Gómez, a wave of racism was unleashed that helped to deny this man, a man of the people, the presidency. It was not just the fact of his Haitian ancestry--as if no Dominican leader had never had some Haitian ancestry (L'Hereaux, Trujillo, Balaguer, etc.!), but that he was BLACK that was used against him. Ironically, the pawn that won as a result, Leonel, is also of obvious African ancestry, so it was really tit for tat. The losers, however, were the Dominican people.

I think you misunderstood, and still do, what I was saying about "mulato." Yes, it may be just another term, like "moreno," etc. People toss it around like "Indio," "pelo claro," etc., but one of the points of this thread is that these terms have a history and historical validity. As Baracutei and others have pointed out, the Taínos did not all die off, and the Indians who were enslaved after they supposedly died off were not all imported from other islands or the South American mainland. That is a fiction. "Indio" and "Taíno" are not terms for phantasms, but for people who did survive in the DR, and whose descendents are walking around the country--and island--today.

Oh, and the DR has a very small identifiable White population, who still control a disproportionate amount of the country's wealth. Or is this not the case? What color--let's not even get into race--are the vast majority of the poor in DR? I do think there's less overt racial tension, but then again, so much of the official lit and discourse of the DR--not the popular culture, and not by many of its finest writers and scholars--erases Blackness altogether, or are you unaware of this too?

As far as PC, the fact that it is only deemed just by AA in the US to use "racial" terms is called PC in my book - sorry - I call it like I see it.

You see it wrong. White people in the US use racial terms all the time, on TV, in print, on the Internet, you name it. They use racial stereotypes about every group, and dare anyone to say anything. Ever listen to Rush Limbaugh, who has the ear of the President of the United States? Bill O'Reilly? Glenn Beck? Mike Savage? David Horowitz? These people I have just named are not Black, Latino, Asian-American, Arab, etc. Right?

Remember too there is not a general animosity between the blacks and whites here too in the DR, there too busy hanging out with eachother and intermarrying - so what is valid in the US is not valid here. BTW, I'm sorry

Are you even aware of why things are socially and politically different? The British took a very different, efficiently brutal approach to colonization from the Spanish, French and Portuguese. I'm sure you're aware of this. They implemented various forms of social and political segregation in most of their colonies, pitting groups against each other to the gain of the British administrators (cf. India, China, the US, etc.). They also engaged in scorched earth policies, sometimes verging on genocide (cf. against the Native Americans, the Aborigines, the Kenyans, etc.), and oppression even against people who shared a great deal of their ancestry (the Irish, etc.). History offers many explanations for why US is the richest and most powerful country on earth, and why Britain is always skipping close behind. Your idealized version of DR history is interesting, but perhaps open a book and you'll see it wasn't always so rosy. But that's for another thread. There's a reason that it was believed that the Taínos had all died off, and it wasn't just because of the illnesses they contracted from the Europeans.

there is only one human race and I consider all to be my bretheren.

Con Dios

True this. So please, before you rant about PC and about Indians being upset by having their names and cultures bastardized by people who couldn't give a damn if they lived or died, either in 1607, 1807, or 2007, let's not forget this: we're all brethren, despite the reality many millions endure every day, and sí, con Díos.

[Chip]

Originally Posted by ElNegrote

we're all brethren, despite the reality many millions endure every day, and sí, con Díos.

El Negrote - bottom line is the race relations for most Dominicans is a lot better than in the US. the point about Pena is valid and the white minority, but then again they are a minority. If you haven't seen that I'd say quite your job, sell you're house move to the DR and marry a black Dominican women like I did. Oh yeah, don't forget to speak the local language fluently. I think over time you're opinion will change.

BTW, the Tainos did not die off bro, they are alive and well.

I, do, however, agree with you final statement.

[Baracutay]

I want to thank Chip and Elnegrote and everyone who has contributed to this very interesting dialoge. Although we differ in opinions (although not truly by much) we are all in complete agreement that no matter what race, color or creed, we are all indeed one race, human.
Let us continue now with the Taino subject. I think that we have so far established, that whether by visual confirmation, or genetic research, there is indeed a Taino presence/descent on the island. I would like to shift your attention for just a moment to the amount of Taino material culture that survives on the island. Some of which the avergae Dominican may practice but not know its origins. Here are a few Taino words/customs that persist in the DR for you to ponder:

Mahuita
Chen chen
guangua
jataca
cayuco y yaso
chola
haitinal
Catibia-naiboa-yare-buren-yucabei
guayo
anamu

All the best
Baracutei

[Norma Rosa]

I don't take part in this thread, but I read the entries often. I beg those of you that post here to edit before posting. English is not well spoken (written) here.