Even if after this time, nearly equal numbers of men and women came, as long as this initial population soldier/native woman population keeps up a high fertility rate among itself, you could get current DNA profiles.
I found the JSTOR PDF! It was not in my research notes, where it should have been, but in the study materials for my Latin American History quals. (The LAH advisor in my committee was McLeod, who wrote the article on colonial immigration and trade for the Cambridge Encyclopedia.) I have uploaded it as Patterns of Spanish Emigration. Be advised. It is big.
What MisterLawyer describes is known as "the founder effect." The first few founders of any new population have an extraordinary impact on its subsequent genetic makeup, despite massive later intromission. This is because genetic impact is based on percentages. So three Amerind women among five early couples have as much impact as thirty thousand Euro women immigrating to join fifty thousand couples descended from the first five.
Also, the actual time-pattern that Boyd-Bowman shows for the 1500s is virtually no females at first, gradually rising to large numbers of females later. The 50-50 mark was not reached until about the time of Jamestown.
Arab culture would definitely have an impact on Latin America, but that does not mean they are the same. The experiences were different. As was Cuba from other parts of Latin America. For Moore to try to project Pre-Castro CUba on to the rest of Latin America would be inaccurate. No other country in Latin America had the Klu Klux Klan. Cuba had the Klu Klux Klan Kubano.
Racism in Latin America is a problem, as is colorism. But there is a lot more variability among groups. Again, classism plays a big role. Even using Cuba as an example, Batista was mixed, yet he was the ruler of Cuba. You would have never seen that happen in the US. The problem is not that discrimination doesn't exist in Latin America. The problem is that the discrimination targets a smaller percentage of people so that there is less of a power base and less confrontation to create a massive civil rights movement. But that is not all. Lack of class and economic mobility is also lacking regardless of look.
The Dalits have been oppressed in as harsh and as dichotomic fashion as African Americans, yet they never had a Civil Rights explosion. Why? Lack of economic and educational mobility. While Blacks in the USA had a larger body count because of one droppism, they also existed in a country where lines where two different societies existed, Black and White and Blacks of all classes existed but apart from Whites.
In Latin America, the vast majority of people are mixed. And most people are not discriminated or even have any major issues with colorism. But the extremes, those that look predominantly indigenous or predominantly African do get discriminated against mostly through stereotyping and especially in upper class run things, exclusion. In Latin America, money and education mainstreams you though. Hard to get there, but if you do, your treatment changes completely. Foreign Blacks tend to be treated well, for example.
Again, this varies from country to country. You can't make one claim for all Latin America.
ome other problems with Moore's analysis. Arabs do not all consider themselves White. But they don't consider themselves Black either. Many Latin Americans are the same way.
Anwar Sadat was part Sudanese. I have never read of him disparaging that part of his ancestry. But he was also part Egyptian. I never heard of him complaining about Gossett himself. Others did complain because Gossett did not look as Arabic/Egyptian as Anwar did.
Yes Egypt and most of Arabia has a lot of racism, as Cuba did. But that does not translate to all of Latin America. For example, many Arab countries do not allow citizenships to foreigners and even their offspring. There is a high level of Xenophobia. Also admixture into Muslim culture has been a lot more gender biased. This level of gender segregated admixture is much higher than Latin America.
And this can also be seen in how far women's rights have gone in those countries.
Batista himself, was excluded from many White only upper class clubs in his youth. No where near as extreme as Jim Crow though.
As for introducing a similar dichotomous reality as the US in Latin America to spark a Civil Rights movement. In the US, there was progress, but at what cost? A Jim Crow period that created hate, paranoia and alienation. Persecution and lynching that has never occurred after slavery to any degree even remotely close, etc. An antagonism across color lines that is disgusting. Naw, I prefer we find another solution to solving our problems. We can learn from the American Civil Rights movement, but that doesn't mean we have to reenact US history.
The Subtle Racism of Latin America Carlos Moore sees a disguised racism permeating Latin American society, invented by Arabs in the Iberian Peninsula.
Anson Musselman, a_musselman@yahoo.com
While many believe that Arab and Latin American societies have a better track record in regard to race than the United States, Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, contends that this impression is wrong. Moore, a black man raised in pre-Castro Cuba, believes that while these societies may look color blind on the surface, race actually dominates every aspect of social and political life. Moore is best known for his book Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (CAAS, 1989), and African Presence in the Americas, co-edited with Shawna Moore and Tanya R. Sanders (Africa World Press, 1996).
This lecture took place in UCLA's Haynes Hall May 19 and was sponsored by the African Studies Center, the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the UCLA Department of Political Science.
The Arab Model
Moore in his youth set out to find what historical events led to the establishment of a racial hierarchy in Latin America, where race mixing is the norm, yet lightness and darkness of skin still matters. His findings led him to believe that the paradigms of race in Latin America are directly descended from the time when Arabs controlled the Iberian Peninsula, the homeland of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the Americas.
Arabs successfully invaded the Iberian Peninsula (today Spain and Portugal) in 711 CE. The Moorish culture that was established was known as Andalusia. By the late 1200s Christian armies had expelled the majority of Muslims from Iberia.
"I have had the privilege to have lived in Arab countries," Moore said, "and to be shocked by the extraordinary similarities to Latin America of structures of race in countries like Egypt. It was familiar ground. I was twenty-one, had just left Cuba. I lived in Egypt for a year. I was surprised to see how it was as though I had not left Cuba except for the fact that they spoke Arabic and adhered to the Muslim religion. From then on I began to study the structures of race relations in the Arab countries in a comparative way with relations in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. That became my focus."
Arab Slavery on the Iberian Peninsula
“Through the Sahara alone," Moore said, "four million blacks were brought over to the Arab Iberian Peninsula. The Arab world was a world in which slavery was essential." Some scholars are skeptical of the size of the numbers Moore cites.
Moore sees the export of Arab-model slavery and race relations to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese, who had absorbed it during the Muslim occupation of Iberia. "The conquest of America begins when the Arabs are expelled from this part of the world by Europeans." Moore added that the Reconquista was accomplished by south Europeans who had already had long experience of intermarriage or less formal sexual relations with Arab and African peoples and who "are perfectly accustomed to a situation of familiarity of race relations between black and white in a situation of superiority and inferiority."
Moore sees two alternate models of racial rule. The one more familiar in the Northern Hemisphere is the Anglo-American one, where power relations and socio-political structures were based on two distinct groups: the Northern European and African prototypes. "We have a stable racial social order achieved and perpetuated through enforcement of an inflexible two-track system whereby extreme racial polarization is involved between two opposing somatic prototypes: The proto-Nordic types with blonde hair, pale white skin, and sharp facial features, and the proto-African type, with crispy hair, very black skin, voluptuous facial features."
Interracial Sex and Commingling
The Arab-Spanish-Latin American pattern was far more permissive of interracial sex and incorporating racial differences, but, Moore adds, not without its own light-skinned hierarchy. Moore asserts that racial mixing was a very normal occurrence in the Arab world; socially acceptable racial mixing, however, only goes in one direction. Moore postulates the existence in Latin America of a "racial philosophy of eugenics" that encourages a "unilateral … sexual commingling between white [or light skinned] males and the females of the physically conquered and socially inferior race."
Like the classification of "colored" in the former Apartheid South Africa, which was ranked as a higher class than the pure African, Moore sees the mixed race "mulatto" in Arab and Latin American society as a higher class than the purebred African or Indian. "The mulatto has a particular rank in society. In Arab societies there are all sorts of ranks. There are infidels, those who are believers, and the mulatto category which is viewed as a ladder for ascension."
The racial mixing that took place in Latin America that was socially acceptable, Moore said, was only between white males and the black or American Indian females.
According to Moore, the possibility of a black or American Indian man having sex with a white woman would have been destabilizing to the state because the black or American Indian penetrating the female would have been viewed as flipping the established racial hierarchy on its head.
Mixed race children from white fathers and dark mothers were totally accepted into society, according to Moore. In each generation males are expected or permitted to marry females of their own skin color or darker. "The production of a stable intermediary swarthy white type is very important to the Latin-Arab model of race relations. It is so important that the state encourages it." Moore views this as "the sexual enslavement of black women by the conquering white males."
The First Slaves in the Americas Were Imported from Spain
The system developed in Iberia under Arab rule was exported to the Americas as part of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest in the sixteenth century. Moore says that the Portuguese and Spanish added American Indians to their already-enslaved black populations brought from Iberia. “The first black slaves that came to the Americas were not slaves from Africa, but black slaves that came from the Iberian Peninsula, who spoke Portuguese and Spanish."
Moore told the audience that the Northern Europeans, “inventors of Apartheid," have traditionally feared the black person, while Europeans from the Iberian Peninsula, as well as their descendants in Latin America, have no such fear. As he put it, "in the U.S. one drop of black blood makes someone black. In Latin America one drop of white blood makes you white."
When Spain and Portugal conquered vast parts of Latin America, Moore said, they established a black slave trade, continued the mixing of the races with white Europeans at the top of the social ladder and American Indian and African descendants at the bottom. Whites lived in close physical proximity to black and American Indian populations, however those of a white European ancestry (Spanish and Portuguese) had the political and economic power. The lightness or darkness of one’s skin strongly affected one’s social rank.
The Rules of the Subtle Race Game
Moore recalled that Hollywood wanted to make a film about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. They had cast an African American in the role, only to have to pull the plug on the project when Sadat objected to a black man portraying him. Sadat, being the leader of Egypt, considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore said there are black-looking Arabs and Latin Americans who consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry. “The only problem is when they go to New York."
Moore expressed some concern about the implications for race relations in the United States posed by the increasing immigration from Mexico and Latin America. While he clearly regarded the often overt racism of the North as perhaps even more objectionable than the Arab-Spanish form in the South, he saw a particular problem in the general Latin American denial of race as an issue. This has made it socially disreputable to raise demands for reform in Latin America around race issues.
Moore concluded by expressing the hope that these new Latin American immigrants will not import their Arab-Latin American model of race relations, as with it comes a false color blindness. To Moore, the U.S. model of dealing with race, while far from ideal, enables groups to make demands on society, and to be able to work for change.
The assertion about the first slaves being of Iberian origin rather than African origin is interesting. It would be wonderful to get source information or at least the evidence for such a claim.
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1057 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Fri 23 Mar 2007 15:13 Post subject:
Christina wrote:
The assertion about the first slaves being of Iberian origin rather than African origin is interesting. It would be wonderful to get source information or at least the evidence for such a claim.
I'd just like to make clear that the slaves from Iberia were Black Africans and a few North Africans (even if they were born in Iberia), not white Portuguese and Spaniards. I don't know what source he used, but I have read this several times in different sources, including World Book Encyclopedia.
Posted: Fri 23 Mar 2007 15:14 Post subject: Re: The Subtle Racism of Latin America?
Christina wrote:
The assertion about the first slaves being of Iberian origin rather than African origin is interesting. It would be wonderful to get source information or at least the evidence for such a claim.
This is just a guess, but he may be talking about the colonists/conquerors of Spanish culture but African ancestry who served with the initial expeditions (Cortez, Cabeza de Vaca, Poce de Leon. Menendez de Aviles, etc.) You can find reference to these soldiers in most accounts of Spanish exploration. Calling them "slaves" may be akin to calling the colonists of African ancestry brought to Jamestown in 1619 "slaves," even though lifelong hereditary forced labor would not be invented in the Chesapeake for nearly another half-century.
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1057 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Fri 23 Mar 2007 15:20 Post subject:
Frank: Do you know if Latin America used a form of indentured servitude (in addition to slavery), like North America? I can't recall having read anything on this at the moment.
Frank: Do you know if Latin America used a form of indentured servitude (in addition to slavery), like North America?
Although I am sure that the Spaniards of the time were familiar with indenture (its 7-year term was established by the Bible, after all), I do not recall that they ever used it in Colonial Latin America. The main forms of forced labor in colonial Latin America were: slavery, encomienda, mita, repartimiento, and peonaje. Although each form’s popularity appeared in more or less the order given, all were to some extent concurrent.
Slavery: Hereditary lifelong forced labor was used on the Caribbean islands for about 40 years after the discovery, until natives were made extinct (their culture was made extinct; their genes live on in us). It was also used on the mainland for first 20 years -- as long as there was abundance of Natives and no local government. Then, contact with the Aztec and Inca military empires changed Spanish attitudes towards labor. After Las Casas, traditional slavery was used only for Africans.
Encomienda: To avoid the bloody regionalism with which Spain was cursed, the crown established the policy that Native Americans were crown property, to distribute as the king saw fit (to supporters, of course), and could not become privately owned slaves. This instituted encomienda. Native Americans were children of Christianity. Moslems reject Christianity but Native Americans never had opportunity to know Christ. Hence, they could not be slaves. They could not be free in the modern sense, of course, so the encomienda saw them as free laborers. Subjects of the crown. “Encomienda” means to entrust. Indians were thus entrusted to entrepreneurs as laborers in return for their Christianization. (Slavery in its original form still existed in northern Spain.) From the point of view of the Native Americans, it was slavery in all but name. From the point of view of the Spaniards, Native Americans under encomienda were crown property under loan, not private property, and this gave the crown control over settler families.
Mita: The mita was the system used by the Incas, adopted by the Spanish in Peru. It was a draft, where every non-exempt able-bodied adult male had to serve for a specified time (typically two years) for the government. They were put to work on infrastructure as well as agriculture of state-owned land.
Repartimiento came out of the mita system, expanded to other colonies, and expanded to private citizens as well as Native Americans. It was a system for drafting private citizens, so may days per year, to work on infrastructure projects. Each village’s leaders were expected to organize its repartimiento quota. The repartimiento pulled labor from maize to wheat and so impoverished villages. Presumably, it was paid labor and so integrated natives into Euro-American economy. Incidentally, the repartimiento system created Potosi, the richest silver mine in the world. In Potosí, the Incas had used a rotational draft mita that brought laborers from hundreds of miles away to work for a six month stint. The Spanish expanded this. The repartimiento was most popular around the population nadir of 1650.
Peonaje was simply sharecropping. Although it looked like serfdom, colonial Latin American peons theoretically had the right to leave and seek their fortunes elsewhere. It became popular towards the end of the 1600s and is still in use.
Incidentally, the Mayas had a classical indenture system, but their civilization was gone before the Europeans arrived, so the Spaniards never saw it. Also, the Aztecs had a classical feudal system with serfs in the traditional sense. The crown explicitly forbade this system (along with the aristocratic titles that went along with it) since it had historically wreaked such havoc in Spain).
All in all, I do not know of any case of indenture in colonial Latin America under either the Spaniards or the Portuguese.
Last edited by fwsweet on Wed 28 Mar 2007 16:20; edited 1 time in total
The assertion about the first slaves being of Iberian origin rather than African origin is interesting. It would be wonderful to get source information or at least the evidence for such a claim.
I'd just like to make clear that the slaves from Iberia were Black Africans and a few North Africans (even if they were born in Iberia), not white Portuguese and Spaniards. I don't know what source he used, but I have read this several times in different sources, including World Book Encyclopedia.
Well, it would certainly follow that they slaves did not look like Dick Gephardt or Nicole Kidman. But, I would venture a guess that some of the slaves and indentured ran the gamut from looking like Rick Fox to looking like Willie Brown. But, how many Iberian browns (Rick Fox) versus Iberian blacks made it into the States as slaves or servants is an empirical question that will probably never be answered, I wouldn't think. But, maybe others see it differently.
The reason that I believe the Iberian slaves to be racially diverse is that at least some of the mtdna L1b group-normally attributable to SS Africa and North Africa, had been in Iberia many years before the Muslim slave trade. Thus the ethnic and genetic histories may have differed, even amongst the mtdna L1b group. ( L1B, is relevant as it is associated to the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas).
Research by Comas 2006 shows that there were L1b remains with motif 16175 that had been in Andulusia, most likely prehistorically. Prehistoric is key-because the arrival to Iberia of this particular haplotype (L1B-motif 16175) predates the Muslim slave trade. Also, there was enough time to assimilate the gene pool. Perhaps not to the point of being white--but perhaps to the point of being a dark middle eastern type. The length of time that this L1B was in Europe, also warrants a concession, that there are mtdna European L's as well as African L's.
In fact, this team of researchers (Comas, 2006) indicated that this particular branch of L1B, with motif 16175, most likely diverged from Africa around 20.000+/-16,000. These( L1B with motif 16175) may have been creolized within North Africa, creolized in-situ within Iberia. And perhaps, they were black. How fully? Don't know. But, given the lenght of time that this L1B group was in Iberia, there was certainly time for racial mixturing to occur.
L1c like L1B has a lot of internal diversity that needs to be assessed. Its quite possible that further excavations and analysis will reveal more about the evolutionary paths of some of these L haplotypes took. A vast number of Brazilian whites have L1C as a haplotype. Perhaps, the reason that so many Brazillians women have transcended their blackness is that they were not black to begin with. Perhaps, they were brown. (An L1c was found in England in the data of Percy-so it is not so much of a stretch that some of the L1C's followed a different time line out of Africa as well).
Last edited by Christina on Wed 28 Mar 2007 12:54; edited 1 time in total
Joined: 02 May 2006 {Posts: 363 } Location: Île-de-France
Posted: Fri 23 Mar 2007 20:45 Post subject:
Quote:
A vast number of Brazilian whites have L1C as a haplotype. Perhaps, the reason that so many Brazillians women have transcended their blackness is that they were not black to begin with. Perhaps, they were brown.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by transcended their blackness? Are you endorsing the one drop rule, that because they have sub-saharan ancestry that they have some blackness to trancesed regardless of phenotype or self-identification? Do African Americans with european ancestors have to transcend their whiteness?
Perhaps the predominance of a specific L1C motif is because a woman born in Africa, brough to Brazil in its very early post colonization history had 8 daughters with a Portuguese, and the rest was history.
I really don't know, but it seems equally if not more likely.
A vast number of Brazilian whites have L1C as a haplotype. Perhaps, the reason that so many Brazillians women have transcended their blackness is that they were not black to begin with. Perhaps, they were brown.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by transcended their blackness? Are you endorsing the one drop rule, that because they have sub-saharan ancestry that they have some blackness to trancend regardless of phenotype or self-identification? Do African Americans with european ancestors have to transcend their whiteness?
I am not endorsing the one drop rule. Where did I challenge the right of the Brazilian women to identify as white? Or even infer the impropiety of such? I predict that you will not find it because it never happened.
The websites or literature of most of the mtdna companies reflect a picture associated to a phenotypically, Sub-Saharan woman for MTDNA haplotype, L1C. The woman or women shown in such pictures, representative of L1C, would not be percieved as white or anywhere near it. If these L1C Brazilians consider themselves white, then they must have lost much/some/all (whatever the case may be) of their SubSaharan essence, if the images of a SS African woman represented by commercial DNA companies, current media and pop culture are truly represenative. That is what I meant by transcendence. Or, perhaps, some/many of the L1C's were closer to mixed race--as opposed to Sub-Saharan black in the first place. It is my view, given that some L1b, some North African horses, all made it across the Straits of Gilbratar into Iberia in prehistoric times, its just as plausible that some L1C types did as well. Especially since one was in the "British" data set by Percy.
Ironically, I believe that my presentation of the nuanced nature of L1B (having both a European and African implantation), argues for more clarity and alternatives when discussing MTDNA as it relates to ethnicity. Certainly, not less.
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1057 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Tue 27 Mar 2007 15:44 Post subject:
Christina:
I erroneously deleted my post requesting the source of the study you mentioned, as well as your response. I apologize for this. I was moving it to the Molecular Anthropology forum, and it didn't take hold. So, I will start a new thread there called Haplogroup L1b, and we can continue it there. Incidentally, you pointed us to a great study, and it does indeed seem to show with reasonable certainty that sub-Saharan lineages entered Europe between 20,000-16,000 years ago. The L1b with 16175 transition seems to be unique to Europe (having likely formed there), even though the basic L1b certainly came from Africa. Thank you very much. I look forward to any other interesting studies you may wish to share.
I erroneously deleted my post requesting the source of the study you mentioned, as well as your response. I apologize for this. I was moving it to the Molecular Anthropology forum, and it didn't take hold. So, I will start a new thread there called Haplogroup L1b, and we can continue it there. Incidentally, you pointed us to a great study, and it does indeed seem to show with reasonable certainty that sub-Saharan lineages entered Europe between 20,000-16,000 years ago. The L1b with 16175 transition seems to be unique to Europe (having likely formed there), even though the basic L1b certainly came from Africa. Thank you very much. I look forward to any other interesting studies you may wish to share.
Great. I look forward to sharing. I do have other articles that I have collected over the last year.
After having read the article, do you still have questions/concerns about what I wrote? I will answer them in the new thread if you like.
Posted: Mon 09 Apr 2007 23:23 Post subject: Re: The Subtle Racism of Latin America?
Quote:
“Through the Sahara alone," Moore said, "four million blacks were brought over to the Arab Iberian Peninsula. The Arab world was a world in which slavery was essential." Some scholars are skeptical of the size of the numbers Moore cites.
Thats bs. 'Four Million black slaves" in Iberia is a major lie by Afro-centrist.
Spain's population at the time was no more than 5 million. Spain would be a mulato country. The typical Spaniard looks Caucasian not mulato.
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