Week Two

In the current United States, ideas about race and racial identify are generally rigid and attempt to be definitive.  Often times a person of mixed race will be placed into their minority category, and many of these people struggle to find a racial identity that they feel truly fits them.  This is not the case in South America and other regions colonized by the Spanish.  In many parts of South America, race is a fluid concept, associated less with ethnic origin and more with physical characteristics.  Racial identities for South American people can change from day to day based on how tanned they are from spending time in the sun and other extraneous factors.  (Authors Lisa Gezon and Conrad Kottak discuss this point in great detail in their textbook titled Culture, which I studied in the Cultural Anthropology class that I took last semester.)

The difference in current views on race in the United States and in South America and other Spanish speaking places can be traced back to interracial relationships between European conquistadors and settlers with the indigenous people and the way that the people who were products of these relations were viewed in their time.  In general areas that were conquered and settled by the Spanish and Portuguese had and still have much less rigid ideas about racial identity than do areas that were taken by the British. 

Spanish men outnumbered Spanish women in the new colonies tremendously, so many of them married or had relationships with native women.  This led to the creation of a new mixed-race population called mestizo.  The mestizo people were not respected as much as their fully Spanish counterparts, but they did work in important roles in the economy of the colonies, earning them some prominence in society.  In Ways of the World, Robert Strayer writes, “Mestizo identity blurred the sense of sharp racial difference between Spanish and Indian peoples and became a major element in the identity of modern Mexico” (629).  This fluid sense of racial identity is prevalent today in Mexico as well as South America and other areas colonized by the Spanish.

Because the number of British settlers was so large, they did not have as many inter-racial marriages and relations as the Spanish and were less concerned with incorporating the native people into their settlements and giving them roles in the community.  Instead they separated themselves from and ostracized the native people, creating distinct groups based on race and custom.  While separate communities such as these are less common today, many people in America believe there are clear lines between racial identities – a belief that stems from interactions between the British settlers and the Native American people.  More so than those in Mexico, people of mixed-race in the United States often struggle with their own racial identities because American people in general carried such rigid ideas about race.