Sex and Race, Volume 2: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands -- The Old World

Chapter One

RACE AND THE NEW WORLD

THE Old World, as was shown in Volume One, is a vast and intricate patchwork of races which came about as the result of the mating of Negro and Caucasian acting together with climate for probably hundreds of thousands of years. But great as this miscegenation was it is excelled by the New World, where we had the entrance of a third element entirely new to civilized man: The Indian.

To the New World came almost every variety of mankind from Europe, Asia, Africa and the South Seas. These, uniting with the Indian, or other varieties that had sprung up in the New World, produced hundreds of other sub-varieties hitherto unknown—varieties which are to be found today from Alaska to the tip of Argentina, and whose blood like the air we breathe has been penetrating even into the most undreamed of places until when we say American we say nearly always mixed blood.

To find anything approaching a pure race in the New World now one must go among the most primitive Indians in the wilds of Peru, Bolivia, and the Amazon. That the peoples of the two Americas are hybrid is a great undeniable fact. If we use the phraseology of the superior Nordic we can call them mongrel.

This mixing of races is true of Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America alike but particularly so of Latin America. What Simón Bolívar, liberator of five South American countries, and one of the most colossal figures of history, said of Venezuela is true of all that region south of the Rio Grande. He said, We must face the fact that our race is not European; it is rather a composite of Africa and America than an emanation of Europe for Spain, itself, ceased to be European by its African blood; its institutions and character. It is impossible to determine exactly to what human family we belong. Most of the Indians were annihilated; the European has been mixed with the Indian and the African. We were all born of the bosom of the same mother but our fathers differing in origin and blood are foreigners and we all differ visibly in color of skin.¹

Spain, itself, ceased to be European by its African blood. Significant words! Words to be remembered whenever we think of the earliest settlers of the New World. Bolivar, in addition to his wide knowledge of Spanish history, had lived in Spain; had seen the racial composition of its people, and was the descendant himself, of a noble Spanish family. We shall presently quote other writers of Bolivar’s time to the same effect. In other words, the discoverers and the earliest trail-blazers of the New World were already mixed—a people which were largely mulatto, if you will—on their arrival in 1492.

Of course, the people in the northern part of the Peninsula, were unmixed white, being largely of Teutonic stock, but in the southern portion they had been mixed Caucasian and Negro from time immemorial.² In fact, this region was only geographically European. Several writers have said that Europe began only at the Pyrenees.

This mixed strain was particularly evident in the Portuguese, who, next to the Spaniards, were the pioneers in the New World. Indeed, it is the Portuguese, who with the Moors, Venetians, Genoese and other mongrels of the Mediterranean, were the pioneers in the world travel and exploration that led up to Columbus. It was the Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 that inspired Columbus to seek a western route to India, and which, in turn, brought about the discovery of America. The Nordics, with the exception of occasional travelers, like Sir John Mandeville, did not come on the scene until nearly a century later under Elizabeth of England.

So mixed were the Portuguese that in 1492 there was already a Negro strain in its royal family. The same was true in less degree of the Spanish royal family. As for Italy, it had not only once been overrun by the Moors, but Negro slaves in great numbers had been brought in, principally between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries by the Venetians.³ The Pisanos and Genoese also imported a considerable number from Nubia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Morocco, and sold them to the noble families, who used them as servants, grooms, and favorites, and even amalgamated with them. So little was the prejudice against color in Europe that in the sixteenth century the son of a Negro female slave, or servant, rose to be head of the most distinguished royal family of the time.⁴

This may be considered extraordinary now but it was not so then. The southern Europeans had been accustomed for centuries to having dark-skinned men among their rulers, in fact, whole series of them. As Roy Nash says, Many North Americans profess horror at the marriage of white and colored types, which is so common in South America. Mark well, then, that the first contact of the Portuguese and Spaniards with a dark-skinned people was the contact of the conquered with the brown-skinned conquerors. And the darker man was the more cultured, the more learned, the more artistic. He lived in the castles and towns. He was the rich man and the Portuguese became serfs upon his land. Under such conditions it would be deemed an honor for the white to mate or marry with the governing class, the brown man, instead of the reverse. Nor was it only the Portuguese peasantry whose blood mingled with the Moors. Alphonso VI, who united Castille and Leon and Galicia in 1073, to cite but one of many instances of marriages between Christian and Arab nobles, chose a Moorish princess, the daughter of the Emir of Seville, to be the mother of his son, Sancho.⁵

Centuries after Columbus, there continued to be much Negro strain in the Latin peoples. G. W. Bridges, writing in Bolivar’s time, says, There can be no doubt that the Portuguese, Spaniards, and Neapolitans are highly tinged with Negro blood.⁶ In 1856, a white American visitor to Puerto Rico testifies similarly to the Negro strain in the Spanish emigrants to that island. He says, Spaniards, generally indulge in the belief, or at least feign to do so, that Creoles are mulattoes and allege with wonderful assurance that by the mere fact of being born in Spain, every Penninsular (Spaniard) is a white. In many cases, however, the evidence of the senses is opposed to this assertion, as the complexion of the greatest part of them is nearer that of the Negroes than of white people. And there are, besides, well-grounded reasons for believing that much African blood flows in their veins, though there are many families that are evidently white, as is also the case in Cuba. One of the armies that invaded Spain in the eighth century was formed of four thousand Negroes from Ethiopia who were never known to have left the country. What must now be the number of the descendants of these Negroes after the lapse of eleven centuries. In fact by their features, by the quality of their hair, the origin of many Spaniards can be confidently traced to the African race. Nevertheless in some provinces of the Peninsula (that is, Spain), they style themselves not only pure whites, but noblemen, also.⁷

This writer barely approaches the number of Negroes that were brought into the Iberian Peninsula. The figure is nearer four million. Unmixed Negroes were coming into Spain from the third century under Hannibal until 1773 when Negro slavery was abolished in Portugal, or a period of more than two thousand years.

What was true of the early Spaniards in the New World was even more so of the Portuguese. An English visitor to Rio de Janeiro, in 1845, says the numbers of the Portuguese he saw there were of nearly as dark a hue⁸ as the mulattoes.

TYPE OF THE FIRST MOTHERS OF LATIN AMERICA.

II.    Mongoyo-Camacan Indian woman of Brazil. Negro and Mongolian strain apparent.

(Koch Grunberg)

Since then, the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians even of the nineteenth century, had so much visible Negro strain, it is reasonable to suppose that among the first explorers and colonizers of the New World there must have been many individuals of Negro descent, although there is little mention of them as such. The reason is that mulattoes were regarded as white. When a European said, and still says, Negro he means an unmixed black man.

For instance, on Columbus’ Third Voyage, only one Negro, Diego,⁹ is mentioned, and in the list of noblemen and gentlemen of quality who accompanied Balboa to the Pacific only one Negro, Nuflo de Olano,¹⁰ is named, but that does not mean that there were not other near-blacks on those voyages. Also, Pietro Alonzo, the pilot of Columbus’ flagship on the First Voyage, is mentioned in The Libretto, the original account of the voyage, which was published in 1521, four times as a Negro. Samuel Byrd Thatcher,¹¹ an authority on Columbus, says, however, that Alonzo il Nigro, was a misprint in the Venetian and ought to have read Alonzo il Nigno. Thus the dispute hinges on whether an n or a g was meant. That Thacher, also, is in error is not impossible.

It is not improbable, either, that Columbus was of mixed blood. His complexion was olive; his cheek-bones were high, and his lips, as seen in the Yanez portrait, were of the full Negroid kind.¹² This portrait, the oldest of all, was thought the most characteristic of him by his heir, the Duke of Veragua.

The arrival of the Spaniards in the New World in 1492 started at once the miscegenation of these fair and these dark-skinned Europeans with the Indians. Absolutely no white women came with the first Spaniards and Portuguese. It was nearly a century and a half before they began to arrive in any appreciable number. It is true that in 1526, white Christian slaves were brought to Puerto Rico and other colonies as wives for the white men, but this importation soon ceased because of the inability of the European woman to stand the environment. Thus, it may be said in the most positive manner that the first mothers of persons of European ancestry born in the New World—the creoles—were Indian. This is perhaps wholly true, also, of the mothers of those of African descent.

The pattern of race-mixing for all the Latin-American colonies from Colorado to Argentina was: First, mixing of white men, some of whom had a Negro strain, with Indian women. The offspring of these were called mestizoes, or mixtures; in Brazil, mamelucos. Incoming Europeans of the next generation took the mestizo girls as wives or concubines, producing offspring that was one-fourth Indian, and so on as the years passed, until sometimes the Indian strain was visible only to the experienced eye.

Another mixed type arose, also, when male Negro slaves arrived in 1502. Taking Indian mates the Negroes produced the zambo; in Brazil, the cafuso, an almost black type with high, upstanding frizzly hair. A third mixture came in with the arrival of the Negro woman, who mixing with the white man, produced the mulato, a blend with which the Spaniard had been long familiar. Then the three mixed types, mestizo, zambo, mulatto, began mixing among themselves, and these mixtures and their offspring with the whites, until there came to be distinguished fifty-five varieties from the original mating of Caucasian, Indian, and Negro.

Those in whose veins ran all three mixtures were known as pardos but as time went the amalgamation became so general that it was often impossible to tell a pardo from a mestizo, or a mulatto from a mestizo. Numbers of mulattoes and mestizoes, in time, came to be indistinguishable from a southern European, too. Thus the student of race-mixing in Latin America though he will hear much about the different varieties can safely avoid pursuing them into their intricacies, because the Latin American, whether he be of Negro or Indian ancestry, if too dark to pass for white will usually claim Indian ancestry.

There are several reasons for this: In claiming Indian ancestry one could always boast that he was the descendant of an Inca or a great chief, and thus be not actually one of the common herd, even though living among the herd. Aristocratic birth counted for far more in those days than now. It was so much believed that all good things came out of kingship and noble birth that even when a black man had gifts that placed him above other blacks, it was said that he was the son of an African king.

It will be interesting to note, however, that at first contact, Indian ancestry was the most despised of all, and Indian civilization considered so much idolatrous trash. The early Spaniards regarded the Indians as just one tiny step above the beast. They called them gente sin razon, people without the power to reason. When, however, the Indian had been exterminated, or reduced to helplessness, there came a tendency to idealize him, as one does any other nearly extinct species, as say his contemporary, the buffalo, for the same is also true of Anglo-Saxon America.

Another curious fact about this boasting of Indian ancestry is that in those South American lands in which Indians are still in the majority, the unmixed Indian is still regarded as the lowest element.

In the case of the mestizo, he, also, like the mulatto, looked down upon his mother’s stock. His aspiration was to be one of the dominant class, which was white, even as the humbler white had aspirations to be a nobleman. The Spaniard in the New World, and even more so his offspring born there, had such great pretensions to being a caballero, or nobleman, that Bishop Damon de Haro of Puerto Rico wrote satirically of his mixed blood Indian and Negro flock a century and a half ago, He who is not descended from the House of Austria is related to the Dauphin of France or Charlemagne.¹³

INDIANS WITH NEGRO STRAIN.

III.    The Negro Strain apparent in these Brazilian Indians might have ante-dated Columbus. (See Appendix I to IX, Part I, Sex and Race in the Old World.)    (Koch-Grunberg.)

The pride of the mestizo and the belief in his supposed superiority over the mulatto lay chiefly in the fact that his hair was straight like that of the European. In color, he was often as dark, however, because the Indian of the tropical belt of the New World was as dark as the West Coast African, and especially the Bantu.

The mestizo and the mulatto, as we shall see, tried to escape the stigma attached to Negro ancestry in ways that will sound strange, if not laughable to a North American, white or black. South of the Rio Grande there still exists a tremendous complex on this matter of color. That brings us to another reason for the supposed social superiority of Indian strain over Negro one: namely, the Negro was useful; he was a worker. Since the Spaniard, by sheer reason of the fact that he had been born in Spain, even though he had been of the scum there, was placed in the aristocratic rank when he came to the New World, and since the aristocrat who soils his hand with labor is no longer one, it followed that that element of the population whose hands were the most soiled belonged automatically to the lowest caste. This was the unmixed Negro as the Indian preferred extermination to labor, a trait that was ingrained in the Indian. For centuries, he had done the hunting and the fishing while the women did the common work. Thus because the Indian was not a worker, and some of his people were kings and chiefs—the Negroes also had kings and chiefs but they were on the other side of the water—the Indian in time came to be regarded, theoretically at least, as being of a caste above the Negro. As regards the mulatto and the mestizo, their parents, the whites, usually gave them the less laborious tasks. Moreover, it was extremely profitable for the whites to create a caste, or castes, as buffers between them and the masses of the unmixed Negroes and unmixed Indians.

The superiority in caste accorded to the individual of mixed white and Indian blood was emphatically not due to the oft-repeated statement that the Indian was not a slave while the Negro was. Indian slavery in the New World was the most grievous, the most cruel in all history. It was worse than that of the Helots of Sparta. Las Casas’ history of the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards is without a doubt the most horrifying document of human atrocities ever written, exceeding even that of the Spanish Inquisition.¹⁴

MORE PROOF OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS.

IV.    Left: Negro idol from British Columbia. Most ancient race yet discovered in North America (Illustrated London News). Right: One of several colossal prehistoric Negro heads discovered in La Venta, Mexico, in 1925. (National Geographic.) See also Appendices I to IX, Part I, Sex and Race in the Old World.

The highest caste, as was said, was the Peninsulars, or those of Old World birth. And here another contradiction. Some of these Peninsulars were mulattoes but because of their birth they ranked with the pure whites and looked down not only upon the mestizo and the mulatto but on the unmixed white man who happened to be born in the New World. This caste system is simply untranslatable in terms of the North American color caste. The simple fact is that while color was important, rank was higher; and rank did not necessarily depend upon color.

So high did Old World birth take precedence over New World one, that many a Spanish and Portuguese father looked down upon his own creole son, even when he was unmixed white, simply because he had been born in America. Stevenson said, All Spaniards in America fancied themselves to belong to a race of beings far superior to those among whom they resided. I have frequently heard them say that they should love their children with greater ardor if they had been born in Europe.¹⁵

Something of this scorn was also felt by the Englishman for the native white Virginian or New Yorker. Indeed, it was not until the first World War that the average Englishman began to yield his inherited contempt for the American. Many still entertain it. In fact, it was this contempt and lack of sympathy, which, in its last analysis, led to the revolt of nearly all of the American colonies, especially the Latin American ones. The Peninsular, even when he was a mulatto, arrogated to himself a status over a white creole that bears a close resemblance to that of a haughty Virginia planter over a mulatto. Calderon, a Peruvian, says, The idealistic temperament of the Latin American, his pretension to a high civilization and to the status of the caballero, creates a natural yearning for a white skin.

And while we are on this subject we may add, by way of trying to establish a more correct idea of racial values than those now in vogue, that the belief that it was the Negro who was submissive¹⁶ and the Indian who was rebellious, is decidedly the reverse. There were, of course, certain very warlike Indians and most stubborn fighters, like some of the tribes of Mexico, Peru, and Chile, but it was the Negroes, who everywhere, revolted most against ill-treatment. Latin America and British West Indian history is studded with Negro revolt.

As Parkes says, Negroes had more physical strength—and also more aggressiveness—than Indians… . The Spaniards were more afraid of Negro rebellions than of risings among the Indians. He adds that in the areas of Mexico where the Negroes were most numerous—Morelos and Vera Cruz—have in modern times been the areas where peasant movements have been most aggressive. This has sometimes been attributed to the influences of Negro blood.¹⁷ The first people in the New World to win their independence were Negroes—the Djukas of Surinam from the Dutch in 1761. The first people of Latin America to win their freedom also were Negroes—the Haitians in 1804.

TYPES OF FIRST MOTHERS OF LATIN-AMERICA.

V.    Newly arrived slave women.    (Stedman.)

But although the Negro stood for little nonsense—in Spain and Portugal he had got along well because he had been on the whole well treated—the Spaniard found it impossible to get along without him, and brought him in such numbers to the colonies that Menendez de Aviles wrote in 1561, In the island of Puerto Rico there are above fifteen hundred Negroes and less than five hundred Spaniards, and in Hispaniola there may be two thousand Spaniards and there are over thirty thousand Negroes… . The same is the case in the island of Cuba and in Vera Cruz, Puerto de Cavallos, which is in Honduras and in Nombre de Dios, Carthagena, Santa Maria, and the coast of Venezuela where are twenty Negroes to one white man, and with the lapse of time they will increase to a great many more.¹⁸ Already in 1522, or only thirty years after the coming of Columbus, there had been a Negro revolt in Hispaniola, or Santo Domingo. On Christmas Day of that year, while Diego Columbus, son of the navigator, and governor of the colony and his friends, were enjoying themselves the Negroes arose and killed and wounded twenty-four whites.¹⁹ Diego Columbus saved his life only by flight.

With this increased importation of blacks came more black women and the Spaniards, finding them more serviceable and nearer the European psychology than the Indian, took them so generally as concubines that mulattoes rapidly increased in all the colonies from Florida to Argentina. And with the advent of the mulatto girls, there came such a zest for cohabiting with them that there arose a proverb, Branca para casar, mulata para f…, negra para trabaljar. (White woman for marriage, mulatto woman for sexual pleasure, black woman for work).²⁰ Gilberto Freyre quotes this for Brazil but it was true of all Latin America and even of the southern United States.

Miscegenation became so free and unrestricted in all the colonies, including the French and English ones, that in time there arose a variety of colors, and combinations of colors that excelled even ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece.

This race-mixing was of so nearly the same pattern in all the Latin American lands that it will not be necessary to consider each country separately. We shall, therefore, take up in this volume only those in which it was most as Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Hispaniola (now the republics of Haiti and San Domingo), and Mexico. Only the highlights in others as Colombia, Panama, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Cuba, and Puerto Rico need be given. As for the French and Spanish colonies in the Louisiana territory they will be discussed in the section on the United States.

___________

¹ Blanco Fombona, R. Simon Bolivar: Discursos y proclamas, p. 47. 1913.

² Rogers, J. A., Sex and Race in the Old World, pp. 151-168. 1941.

³ Saco, J. A., Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos mas remotos, etc., Vol. 3, pp. 185, 197-8. 1877.

⁴ Rogers, J. A., Sex and Race, p. 163. 1941.

⁵ Nash, R., Conquest of Brazil, p. 37. 1926.

⁶ Bridges, G. W., History of Jamaica, Vol. 2, p. 399. 1828.

⁷ Philalathes, P., Yankee Travels Through Cuba, pp. 319-20. 1856.

⁸ Gardner, G. Travels in the Interior of Brazil, pp. 4-15. 1846.

⁹ Navarette, M. J., Viajes de Cristobal Colon, p. 322. 1922.

¹⁰ Oviedo., Historia general y natural de indias, Vol. 3, p. 12. 1853.

¹¹ Thacher, S. B., Christopher Columbus, Vol. 2, pp. 455, 479, 503. 1903.

¹² Winsor, J., Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 2, p. 72. 1886.

¹³ Quoted by Van Middledyk in History of Porto Rico, p. 204. 1903. See also Schurz, W. L., Latin America, p. 70. 1941.

¹⁴ See Appendix to Chapter One, p. 398.

¹⁵ Stevenson, W. B., Twenty Years Residence in South America, pp. 293-4. 1825.

¹⁶ See Appendix to Chapter One.

¹⁷ Parks, H. M., A History of Mexico, p. 95. 1938.

¹⁸ Quoted by Lowery W., The Spanish Settlements, pp. 14-15. 1905.

¹⁹ Oviedo, Historia general, etc., Vol. 1, p. 108 (Chap. 4).

²⁰ The Turkish equivalent of this, as quoted by Volney, is, A white woman to please the eye; and an Egyptian and a black one for sexual pleasure. The Orientals make less distinction between mulattoes and blacks than Europeans.

Chapter Two

VENEZUELA

MISCEGENATION in Venezuela proceeded along the lines described in the last chapter, namely, concubinage with first, the Indian, and then the Negro, women, with some few marriages. Laws were made for the protection of the very young Negro girls but their luscious flesh proved too tempting for the white men and the girls were ordered locked up each night when they reached the age of ten until they were married. This, also, did not work as the guardians, themselves, became seducers according to F. de Pons, French Consul in Venezuela in the 1800’s. He wrote, Very frequently are they seduced and supported in the vicious course by those very persons whose duty it is to be guardians of their morals. How many wives united to their husbands in the sacred bonds of matrimony daily see the nuptial bed polluted by their own slaves without being able to revenge themselves upon the caprice by which they are injured, but by indulging inclinations equally guilty, which they have not an equal opportunity of gratifying.¹

As regards mixed marriages, Venezuela was very liberal at first. Legitimate mulatto children had the same rights as white ones; and illegitimate white children the disadvantages of an illegitimate mulatto one. But as the number of Negroes, and especially of mulattoes, increased, laws were passed lowering the status of the people of color. No Negro, even if free, could hold public office or serve in the royal troops, but only in a colored militia, officered by whites. Free mulattoes could be doctors and surgeons; by dispensation of the king, they could enter holy orders or be candidates for public office, but a full-blooded Negro could not aspire to such favors though he were a nonpareil of science and a pattern of virtue.²

Mixed marriages, some of which were with distinguished Spanish families, continued, however, until 1785, when the plantation owners succeeded in getting the king’s consent to a decree making the consent of parents necessary to marriage, and providing that a difference of race could constitute a parental objection.

One reason for this law was that more European women of the upper class had been coming to the colony thus permitting the upper class to take firmer root and thereby relegating the mixed blood women more to concubinage. Still another, and probably the stronger reason, was that the Negroid population—mulattoes, free blacks, and slaves—had become so numerous that they threatened to dominate the colony. The slaves alone numbered 208,000, while in Caracas, the capital, the total Negroid population was three-fourths of the whole. As for the Indian, he had practically disappeared either by extermination or absorption.

Gil Fortoul, Venezuelan historian, estimates that at the founding of the republic in 1811 the mulattoes and the blacks were nearly double the number of Spanish and creole whites. He gives 12,000 whites, 200,000 creoles, and 406,000 people of color. Again and again in Venezuela, as in other Latin-American countries, certain leaders by winning over the mulattoes and blacks were able to seize power. Boves, Paez, and Guzman Blanco, were among those who did this in Venezuela.

During the revolution of 1811, the lower classes of Negroes, zambos, and mulattoes attained such ascendancy that they publicly insulted even the European Spaniards on the streets and forced the white men to acknowledge Negro women as the equal of the white ones. G. D. Flinter, an English colonel and interpreter, resident in Caracas, says, The Negroes and the mulattoes had the privilege of greeting any person be his rank or situation in life what it might, with the familiar appellation of citizen. No public balls or dinners were given to which they were not invited with marks of particular preference; and to such a height did this levelling distinction arrive in a country like Caracas where it was, previous to the revolution, considered a mark of infamy to have any connection, or even acquaintances of color, they used to take out the ladies to dance at the public halls. On one occasion some ladies indignant at an insult of this nature refused to dance when an immense multitude of people of color gathered round the doors of the assembly room threatening to put every white person to death if they should again refuse their sable companions for partners.³

Of these mixed-bloods and Negroes, the most powerful single group was the llaneros, or cowboys, the offspring of runaway slaves, Indians, and fugitive whites. Flinter, who describes them at length, said that by intermarrying with the Indians, they soon became very numerous, and the children proceeding from a mixture of the Indian and Negro blood form that race of men distinguished by the name of zambo.

These impetuous horsemen swept down on the captal in 1814 and uniting with the lower classes of Negroes and mulattoes wreaked terrible vengeance on the whites, near-whites, and whites-by-law, for their past contempt and treatment of them. Flinter, who witnessed the massacre, says, Men, women, and children, who had the slightest tinge of European blood fell indiscriminate victims to their fury.

DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA.

VI.    African women, like these were, with the Indians, the first mothers of Latin-America. They were eagerly sought by the European colonists.

AFRICAN BELLES.

VII.    Women like these were, with the Indians, the first mothers of those born in the New World. (Collection, Count de Bearn.)

TYPES OF THE FIRST MOTHERS OF LATIN AMERICA.

VIII.    Slave women with the African markings still on their face dressed in Portuguese style (Debret).

TYPES OF THE FIRST MOTHERS OF LATIN AMERICA.

IX.    African slave girls dressed in Portuguese style. Note the filed teeth. (Debret).

MIXING OF WHITE AND INDIAN IN LATIN AMERICA.

X(a).    Mestizoes. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

MIXING OF WHITES AND NEGROES IN LATIN AMERICA

X(b).    Mulatto, Quadroon, and Octoroon. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

WHITE-NEGRO-INDIAN INTERMIXTURE IN LATIN AMERICA.

X(c).    Mixed Castes. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

WHITE-NEGRO-INDIAN INTERMIXTURE IN LATIN AMERICA.

X(d).    Mixed Castes. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

As regards the marriage law making parental consent necessary, this slowed up mixed marriages but did not stop them entirely. Marriage of dark Negroes and white girls continued, the white girls being usually foundlings, whose mothers had abandoned them chiefly because they were illegitimate, or the result of adultery. Such children were usually left at the entrance of some house, before the gate of some church, or in the open street, says Pons.

It is observed, he adds, that these new-born infants when exposed are generally picked up by women of color, sometimes black women. If the child was a boy it was received by the monks, when it grew older, but the girls were left to share the poverty of their foster-parents, till they get married; and one need not be informed that when bred by persons of color, and altogether destitute of fortune, they are under necessity of giving their hand to the first man of color who asks it.⁴

Of course, a large proportion of the whites had, by this time, a Negro strain. Not only that but even a dark mulatto, if he were rich enough, could purchase a royal decree, or white papers, making himself a white man, with all the privileges of one.

The mulatto women, because of their rivalry with the white women, were especially eager to get white papers. Pons says as regards this rivalry, The white women, who are too frequently mortified by the rival-ship of women of color, not to entertain considerable prejudice against them, have always asserted the exclusive privilege of using in church carpets which are carried there by their servants. She who had one drop of African blood flowing in her veins must not pretend to this piece of convenience. The petticoats of those women who are tinged by the slightest shade of black are condemned to be soiled by the dusty floor of the church while their delicate knees must bend upon the hard flags. However, adds Pons, "When money can create a powerful interest and give animation to the zeal of patrons, entire families are, according to royal ordinance, transferred from the class of freemen of color to that of the whites. It is unlawful to reproach them with the viciousness of their origin, and they are declared competent for exercising any public function.

During my stay at Caracas a whole family of color obtained from the king all privileges attaching to the whites. All the real advantages which they derived from this advancement seemed to me to devolve upon the women, who, thereby acquired the right of kneeling upon carpets at church. Vain of this newly acquired privilege they displayed in the exercise of it such ostentation and extravagance as could afford no gratification but to vulgar pride.⁵

Incidentally, what happened in Venezuela happened also in other Spanish-American lands, thus it will be seen that when certain writers, as is so often the case, protest that this or that great South American had no Negro strain, he is not necessarily right. Being socially white and physically white may be two entirely different things in Latin America.

The majority of the old families and the celebrated men of Venezuela have, perhaps, a Negro or zambo strain. Gil Fortoul, one of the most reliable historians of that land, speaks freely on the subject and declares that even the family of Simon Bolivar, greatest of all South Americans, was of mixed blood. He says, A great number of the creoles who alleged that they were of pure Spanish blood were in reality mestizos or pardos through secret indifference of their grandfathers, or as legitimate descendants of mixed-blood conquistadores, as Francisco Fajardo, Alonzo Ruiz Vallejo, Juan de Urquijo, etc. Even the family of Bolivar, though of illustrious ancestry, was already of mixed blood at the end of the colonial period. Later, it is well-known that a sister and a niece of the Liberator married with pardos.⁶

Bolivar, himself, said frankly that Venezuelans could not consider themselves a white people, not only because they had mixed so freely with Indians and Negroes, but that their ancestors, the Spaniards, were not white to begin with. He ridiculed the idea of superiority because of Spanish birth and laughed at sangre azul, or blue blood.

To give weight to his conviction, he, the president of the country, ranking with Washington and Toussaint L’Ouverture as one of the three then superbly greatest figures of the New World, gave his niece, Felicia, who was also his adopted daughter, to Laurencio Silva, one of his favorite generals, and a Negro, in marriage. Felicia, very proud of her aristocratic Spanish blood, refused vehemently and yielded only when Bolivar threatened to cut her off without a penny. She bore Silva many children but she never forgave Bolivar. Many years later, when she was an old woman, and one of her grandchildren asked her whether Bolivar had gone to heaven, she replied, bitterly, No, he has gone to hell for having made me marry a Negro.⁷

Another noted Venezuelan, who was of Negro blood, and who openly proclaimed it, was Carlos Manuel Piar, hero of San Felix, and probably Bolivar’s superior in military skill. Piar, whose victory over the Spaniards at San Felix, had turned the tide of battle in favor of independence, felt that he ought to be supreme commander of the army, instead of the second as he was. He incited the mulatto officers and Negro troops to revolt on the ground that being men of color they were being discriminated against. Piar, a native of Curacoa, was born of humble mulatto parentage and had worked his way up from the ranks. He was light-colored, which probably led some historians to say that he was not a mulatto but only claimed to be one in order to win over the mulattoes and the Negroes. However, most writers as Restrepo, Baralt, Larrazabal, O’Leary, and Ybarra, say that he was of Negro ancestry.⁸

FAMOUS VENEZUELANS OF NEGRO AND NEGRO-WHITE ANCESTRY.

XI.    1. General Joaquin Crespo, President. 2. General Judas T. Pinango, a valiant leader of the Revolution, and an unmixed black. 3. General Jose Maria Heredia. 4. General Laurencio Silva, favorite of Bolivar, a dark Negro. 5. General Jose Antonio Paez, President, and one of Venezuela’s great heroes. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

FAMOUS VENEZUELANS OF NEGRO-WHITE ANCESTRY.

XII.    1. General Manuel Piar, ablest commander of the war for independence. 2. General Francisco L. Alcantara, President. 3. General Luis F. Garcia Riveron. 4. General Antonio Narino, who also shows an Indian strain.

Still another great Venezuelan, who showed Negro ancestry, but was vigorous in denying it, was General Antonio Páer, conqueror of Boves, and who was also President, and still later minister to the United States. While in the United States, Paéz was commonly taken for a colored man, to his great chagrin. Paéz claimed that he was white on all four sides and with no Jewish strain. His father had once been refused permission to carry a gun on the ground that he was colored, but taking the matter to court, he had proved his white status, which, as was said, was no actual proof that he was white by race. Paéz had a mulatto mistress, Barbarita Nieves,⁹ who was his political brains. She bore him several sons, who were educated in the United States.

The most spectacular figure in the war for Venezuelan independence, however, was neither white nor mulatto, but a full-blooded black, Pedro Camejo, El Negro Primero. Mounted on a powerful horse and with his lance, he would charge into a whole troop of Spaniards. A monument stands to El Negro Primero in Caracas.¹⁰

Among the mulatto presidents of Venezuela named by Clinton and others are General Tadeo Monagas (1845-57), who freed the slaves in 1845; his brother, Jose Gregorio; Dr. Raimundo Andueza Palacio; and General Francisco Linares de Alcantara.¹¹

Still another president with Negro strain was the celebrated General Crespo. W. E. Curtis, a white American, who knew him says, His face is a fine type of the mulatto.¹²

Curtis, who lived in Venezuela in 1895, wrote, While the color line is not entirely obliterated in Venezuela society it is not as strictly drawn as in the United States and the fact that a man has Negro blood in his veins does not debar him from either social or professional, or political honors…. It is a common thing to see a white woman with an octoroon or even a mulatto for a husband, and even more common to see a white husband with a tinted Venus for a wife at public halls, at the hotels and other places of resort. In political, commercial and social gatherings the three races—Spanish, Indian, and Negro—and the mixed bloods, mingle without distinction. It is an ordinary sight to find black and white faces side by side at the dining-tables of hotels and restaurants and in the schools and colleges the color of a child makes no difference in his standing or his treatment. Some of the most accomplished scholars in the country, some of the most eminent lawyers and jurists are of Negro blood; and in the clergy no race distinction is recognized. I have seen a colored theological student—and one can always be detected by the long black frock and shovel-hat he wears—walking arm-in-arm with a white comrade, and in the assignment of priests among the parishes, the bishop never thinks of race prejudice. The present bishop is reputed to have both Indian and Negro blood in his veins. A Sunday morning I dropped in upon a congregation of worshippers in one of the fashionable churches, and found a Negro priest singing mass. I could not distinguish a single colored person in the congregation, and all the attending acolytes were white. Some of the wealthiest planters in the country are full-blooded Negroes.¹³

Race mixing was so thorough in Venezuela that today, except in a few spots, near the coast, a native Venezuelan unmixed black is a rarity. Of course, with the abolition of slavery, black immigration ceased, while a white one went on. The color of the present native population ranges from dark mulatto to octoroon with evidences of Indian ancestry in hair and certain tints of complexion.

The late Juan Vincente Gomez, dictator, and the most talked of Venezuelan of our times, was of mixed blood, being what was known as a cholo. One of his blood relatives, who came to the United States about 1922, lived in Harlem and was treated otherwise as a colored American. Gomez was one of the world’s wealthiest men, Venezuela being very rich in oil. His fortune was estimated at $200,000,000.

___________

¹ Pons, F., Travels in South America, Vol. 1, p. 162. 1807.

² Pons, Vol. 1, p. 176.

⁴ Pons, Vol. 2, p. 180. 1807.

⁵ Pons, Vol. 1, pp. 175-76.

⁶ Gil Fortoul, J., Historia Constitucional de Venezuela, Vol. 1, pp. 57-8. 1907.

⁷ Clinton, D. J., Bolivar: Man of Glory, p. 329. 1939.

⁸ Lemly, H. R., Bolivar, pp. 142-3. 1923.

Biographie Universelle, Vol. 40, p. 390. (see Sucre).

Ybarra, T. R., Bolivar, pp. 135-6. 1929.

Ferguson, E., Venezuela, p. 37. 1939.

⁹ Clinton, D. J., Gomez, Tyrant of the Andes, pp. 22-3. 1936.

¹⁰ Rojas, A., Estudios Historicos, Vol. 3, pp. 53-73. 1927.

¹¹ Clinton, D. J., p. 24. 1938.

¹² Curtis, W. E., Venezuela, p. 123. 1902.

¹³ Curtis, W. E., pp. 156-59.

Chapter Three

BRAZIL

OF all the Latin American lands, Brazil has had the greatest and most thorough miscegenation. This began about 1500 entirely with Indian women. The heat, the deadly insects, the fever, and the savage warfare made the region quite unfit for European women.

The Indians with whom the Portuguese amalgamated had, it seems clear, a Negro strain. Negro and Negro-Indian peoples, without a doubt, had been living in the tropical belt of the New World ages before the coming of Columbus. Pigafetti who made the first voyage around the world with Magellan and touched southern Brazil in 1519, or nineteen years before the arrival of the African Negro as a slave, says that the inhabitants of southern Brazil had short and woolly hair,¹ a characteristic of Negroid peoples.

The offspring of the Portuguese and the Indians were called mamelucos and with the females of these the incoming Portuguese of the next generation intermarried. In 1538, came the Negroes from Africa, and with these the Portuguese, who were already used to Negro concubines in Europe, intermixed freely.

The Negroes came from regions as far away as Madagascar, Mozambique, India, and Malaya. The great majority came from the African west coast, which was only 1600 miles away, and were principally Yimbas, Dahomeyans, Hausas, Tapas, Mandingoes, Angolas and Minas. Certain of them as the Hausas were Mohammedans, and were skilled artists and weavers, and for that time, good farmers, and iron-workers.

The most eagerly sought of the black women were the Minas, who were tall, with frizzly hair, velvety skins, full bosoms, and walked with the rhythm and verve of primitive Africa. Slave hunters were given special orders to capture them, and when they arrived in Bahia, then the capital of Brazil, there was keen bidding for them by the richer colonists, who installed them in many a Casa Grande, where they became the mothers of the future masters and mistresses of the plantations.

Since the Portuguese were already mixed, they were particularly liberal in the matter of race. Concubinage was common and the only bar to free marriage between white and mulatto was not race, but European birth. The man born in Portugal, or Filho de Reino—Son of the Kingdom—considered himself far superior to the creole, or the one born in the colony. Was he not belonging to a culture that was infinitely superior to wild and primitive Brazil? It was not a question of color at all because a mulatto born in Portugal, by sheer virtue of his birth there considered himself, and was so regarded, as superior to even an unmixed white who had been born in the New World. Writing as late as 1830, Debret says that the Portuguese-born disdained to admit a difference of color in the native-born Brazilian and regarded the white native-born Brazilian as a mulatto.² In 1850, so serious was this that the white creoles rose in revolt.

Favored by its proximity to the African coast, the slave-trade of Brazil increased to such extent that the Negroes quickly outnumbered the whites. In two years alone, 1583-1585, 14,000 Negroes were brought in.

In less than a century, the Negroes had become so numerous that they provided the balance of power, whereby the Portuguese were able to defeat their Dutch neighbors, who had swarmed into the country from the West Indies, Guiana, and Holland. Led by the renowned Henri Dias, a full-blooded black,³ the Negroes defeated Prince Maurice of Nassau, and broke the power of the Dutch in Brazil, which in turn had its repercussions in New Netherland, now New York. In this war, some of the blacks reached the rank of Captam-Mor, a title formerly reserved for the upper class.

The power of the Negroes in Northern Brazil, especially the warlike Hausas, grew so great that breaking away from the whites they founded republics of their own some of which lasted for fifty years, and of which the most noted was Palmares founded in 1673.⁴ Since this region is rich in gold and diamonds, and produced sugar, tobacco, cotton, and still later much seringa, or rubber, some of the Negroes grew wealthy and powerful, having vast plantations with hundreds of Negro and Indian slaves.

The daughters of these rich Negroes were eagerly sought in marriage by incoming Europeans—Portuguese, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Hollanders, and Germans. Richest of these Negro, zambo, and mulatto people were those in the province of Ceara, who were the founders of the great seringa, or rubber industry. As Bruce says, "The Cearenses, a blending of the mame-lukes with the mulattoes, have given Brazil her great seringa industry. It was the people from Ceara who penetrated the forests of the Amazon and gave the world its first seringa supply. It is the Cearenses and their neighbors, the Paraenses, that work these seringaes today.⁵

The Negroes continued to