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Sex and Race, Volume 2. J. A. Rogers
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isbn 9780819575562
Автор произведения J. A. Rogers
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Издательство Ingram
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.
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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