A Note on the US Census
for those of us who are of Mexican ancestry
and for our extended
communities
It's become a quandary, I know, this
separation of "race" from our status as "Latinos" or
"Hispanics."
But look: Latino and Hispanic are not and never were
races: we all know that, amongst our own people, there are Latinos
who are black, who are white, who are brown . . . we are a mezcla
of varied races. It's one of the effects of colonization, no?
When I was teaching at the university level, I always asked my
Cultural Studies students to consider with me the distinctions
between Ethnicity, Race, Nationality, and Color.
I would ask them each to self-identify, in each of those
"categories." Generally, most students gave their nationalities as
their ethnicities. Sometimes, that's not incorrect—so long as one
is a citizen of that country . . .
To review: nationality is simply your citizenship. When
people ask me, "Where are you from?", I always smile, and answer,
"Here." They fumble, and say, "No, I mean . . ." I say, again, "I
was born in the United States. I'm from here." That is my
nationality.
Ethnicity is generally derived from the various races,
nationalities, and cultural heritages of your ancestors. One can
be, for example, ethnically Irish, while never having visited
Ireland. This would mean you have an Irish parent or grandparent.
To be an Irish national, however, you must be a citizen of
Ireland. The same is true of being Mexicano. We are Mexicano by
ethnicity, because our peoples are from that land—and from this
land, much of which was once also México. Some of us may have once
been Mexican nationals.
Race has been long-disputed, in the worlds of science.
There is an entire area of academic study devoted to the history of
race science, and that is fascinating. It wasn't until the middle
of the last century that cranial measurements as a way for "proving
intelligence" between "the races" was finally debunked. Yes, that
meant literally measuring skulls, to show white people were smarter
than people of color.
What color has to do with race is a sticking
point, in much of the so-called "scientific" debates. The popular
movements toward secularization and social Darwinism during the
late 19th and early 20th centuries worked to decrease the perceived
distance between "animal" and "human," and thus redoubled the
emphasis on adherence to "proper" standards of cultural refinement
and respectability. Immigrants of the 19th century, as historian
Linda Gordon points out, most likely had their own misconceptions
about the ethnic conflicts: "But this was not a situation of social
distance created by misunderstanding. The main dynamic here was not
difference, but domination" (Gordon, 47).
And that's been the focus, mi gente.
So, yes, I received the thin paper form, where I am asked, like
everyone else, to declare my heritage.
I checked that I am Latina.
And I checked that I am native to this land. Where I was
asked to identify my tribe, I wrote: Mexican. We are
indigenous peoples. Travel around México: if you're not blonde,
blue-eyed, and white-skinned, you're called indio, indian.
The same is for our native Spanish-speakers along the frontera. I
am not going to allow the US census to rob me of my
indigeneity.
The census has, in this country, a rather woeful history. Let's
consider the link between the early study of eugenics and the
development of the US census . . .
In 1840, the United States census for the first time enumerated the
population of the insane. This controversial study produced an odd,
and hotly debated, discovery: that the South had almost no insane
blacks, while a greater concentration of blacks with mental
afflictions lived in the North, with incremental increases in the
rates of insanity in all states between. The state of Louisiana
showed only 1 in every 4,310 blacks to be insane; in Virginia, the
rate increased to 1 out of every 1,309; in Pennsylvania, blacks
were afflicted at the rate of 1 in 257; in Massachusetts, the
number of afflicted blacks appeared to rise to 1 in 44; and in
Maine, a staggering 1 in every 14 black persons was recorded in the
1840 census as insane (Prudhomme and Musto, 1973).
A flurry of explanations for this "phenomenon" held sway. French
geographer and statistician Jean Boudin concluded that cold
climates were destructive to the mental health of blacks (Boudin,
1875, 143-44). Northern abolitionists were incensed by what they
considered the false data presented in the census. And Secretary of
State John C. Calhoun of South Carolina found in the statistics a
"scientific" motivation for the preservation of slavery: soon after
the figures had been published, Calhoun chided the British
ambassador for speaking to the need to abolish slavery, since, as
"science" had demonstrated, the elimination of the "protected"
condition of the black in slavery would condemn him to a state of
civilization, in which he appeared to run a 7% chance of becoming
an idiot or a maniac. Calhoun regretted that this was the case, but
the 1840 census had "proved" it to be so (Deutsch, 1944).
In the storm of controversy surrounding the publication of this
census, Secretary of State Calhoun was called upon by Congress to
re-examine the data. Calhoun "brought in as an expert the same
Southern gentleman who had originally taken the census. No error
was found" (Prudhomme and Musto, 31). Calhoun himself found "the
facts" on race evidenced by the census to be "unimpeachable," and
asserted that the abolition of slavery would be to the African "a
curse instead of a blessing" (Calhoun, 1856, 461).
Northern abolitionists, angered by the census, were heartened by
the research by E. Jarvis, who reported that, in New England, at
least, the statistics of the census had no basis in reality: the
city of Worcester, for example, had listed 133 "colored idiots and
insane." But this figure was determined by Jarvis to represent the
total population (all white) of the Worcester Asylum. The census
had also ascribed black "idiots and insane" to towns in the
supposed mind-destroying cold of Maine, when, in fact, there were
no black inhabitants of those towns whatsoever. The veracity of the
sixth census of 1840 was thus undermined by Jarvis' research, but
the federal government refused to publicly alter the figures or
admit the error (Prudhomme and Musto, 1973, 31). "Responding to
scientific racism," according to contemporary scholars Nancy Stepan
and Sander Gilman, "was particularly difficult, because of certain
characteristics of the emerging discourse of science itself." They
add that, "from the mid-nineteenth century onward, scientific
claims could be effectively rebutted only by scientific discourses,
to which resisting groups stood in an especially disadvantaged and
problematic position" (77).
As a result of this uneven tension between hegemonic and
counter-discourses, the figure of "the noble savage" again
predominated in the legal and medical narratives of the Antebellum
Period, when a low reported rate of black insanity had established
for psychological theorists the African American lack of
"civilization." When the rate appeared to more closely approximate
that of whites, explanations reversed, "proving" instead that
insanity was no longer a sign of "advancement" (Prudhomme and
Musto, 1973). The protective failures of Reconstruction and the
consequent disenfranchisement of the former slave was described in
terms of the black's inability to adjust, due to a constitutional
inferiority. After the Civil War, the common explanations for black
mental illness were, by turns, linked to political, social,
organic, and hereditary causes, which reinforced the "scientific"
conclusions of black inferiority.
Doctors Prudhomme and Musto, whose 1973 essay, "Historical
Perspectives on Mental Health and Racism in the United States"
appears in the landmark collection Racism and Mental Health,
explain that:
Generally, mental illness was explained as the effect of
environmental and constitutional factors on the personality. An
individual's constitution was the result of many generations of
accumulated experience in society, a product of the inheritance of
acquired characteristics. This past society might be civilized, as
in the case of the representative New Englander, or uncivilized, as
in the case of the African slave. So there were two important
variables, the present social environment and the constitutional
makeup of the patient. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
the environment seemed to hold sway as the chief cause of mental
illness; in the latter half of the century, the bodily constitution
seemed more important. However, both factors were always available
for explanation. (35-36)
The supposed low insanity rate of the black was often, and
conveniently, interpreted during the nineteenth century as a result
of "the comfort of slavery" or "the dull strength of the
uncivilized." After emancipation, not incidentally, the reported
number of mentally ill blacks began to climb. Dr. A.H. Witmer of
St. Elizabeth's (formerly the Government Hospital for the Insane)
looked back on slavery as a sort of golden age, the end of which
caused the rate of insanity to increase dramatically. Witmer (1891)
explained that:
previous to their emancipation, the health and morals of the
slaves were carefully preserved, and inebriety, excessive venery,
and venereal diseases were closely guarded against; since their
liberation, through over-indulgence, exposure, and ignorance of the
laws of health, many have suffered from the effects of these
fruitful causes of insanity. Untutored in a knowledge of the world,
and without a sound philosophy or a religion deeper seated than the
emotions to sustain them in adversity, many minds have failed under
the constant strain of their advancing civilization.
(36-37)
"Rarely considered by writers on the subject," according to Doctors
Prudhomme and Musto, "were other factors which might account for an
increased enumeration of the mentally ill, such as changing
patterns of health service delivery or a rising utilization of
health services by groups such as Blacks" (37).
Many leading thinkers of the period believed "that human races had
been produced by degeneration from an original type. Color provided
a rough index of the degree of degeneration." This concept
"satisfied the conviction shared by Europeans and [Anglo] North
Americans of their innate superiority without violating the Old
Testament. If God had made a single, perfect human, only
degeneration could explain the 'obvious' physical inferiority and
cultural weakness of the African" (Reilly, 5).
The American Journal of Insanity, for example, reported with
interest, in 1886, a study conducted by Dr. J.M. Buchanan entitled,
"Insanity in the Colored Race." Dr. Buchanan, at the time
superintendent of a Mississippi asylum, accepted a relationship
between civilization and insanity, partly attributing to the
effects of civilization an increase of insanity among blacks.
Further, however, Dr. Buchanan also listed specific organic factors
contributing to the "retarded development of Blacks, as compared to
that of whites. This limitation was, according to Buchanan, "owing,
as some pathologists maintain, to the fact that the cranial sutures
close much earlier in the Negro than in other races" (op
cit.).
As support for his cranial limitation theory, Buchanan wrote
that:
in childhood, Negroes are bright, intelligent, and vivacious,
and as a rule, learn as fast as whites of the same age, but on the
approach of adult life, a gradual change is manifested. The
intellect seems to become clouded: they grow unambitious and
indolent, and losing their interest in their books, their
advancement grows slower and finally ceases altogether. . .The
growth of the brain is arrested by the premature closing of the
cranial sutures and the lateral pressure of the frontal bones
(1886, 69)
Dr. Samuel George Morton, in 1839, also undertook to examine racial
differences by conducting a systematic examination of 256 skulls
from five "major" peoples (Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, American,
and Ethiopian):
Proceeding with what appeared to be sound scientific caution,
he used lead shot to measure the volume of each cranium. He found
that there were significant differences in cranial capacity among
the different peoples. Although he at first hesitated to draw the
inference that his findings could be used to distinguish the races,
by 1840 Morton was certain that the average capacity of the
Caucasian skull was seven cubic inches greater than that of the
Negro skull. As he had firmly rejected an environmentalist
explanation for this variance, and as Darwin had yet to publish his
revolutionary thesis, Morton had no choice but to conclude that the
Creator had varied cranial size among the races. The findings were
reassuring: if Caucasians had bigger brains, were they not
superior? Had not God so ordained? (Reilly, 6)
Only within the last decades have Morton's measurements been shown
to have been "significantly biased," through the work of the late
Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (ibid.).
Furthermore,
The result of the various processes of transformation of
science that accompanied industrialization and modernization was
that, from 1870 to 1920, science became both more specialized and
authoritative as a cultural resource and language of
interpretation. It began to replace theological and moral discourse
as the appropriate discourse with which to discuss nature. Science
also encroached heavily on political discourse, as many political
issues were transposed into the realm of neutral "nature," the
scientists' province. The outcome was a narrowing of the cultural
space within which, and the cultural forms by which, the claims of
biological determinism could be effectively challenged.
(Stepan and Gilman, 80)
Still, early attempts at scientific counter-discourse flourished
during this period, particularly among African-American scholars.
Intellectual and empirical attacks on scientific racism were waged,
for example, in W.E.B. Du Bois' 1906 The Health and Physique of
the Negro American, the first of the Atlanta University
publications on Black Americans, supervised by Du Bois himself. In
addition to researching extant data in the U.S. Census records, Du
Bois arranged to have craniometrically measured about 1,000
students at Hampton Institute in Atlanta, following the techniques
of the "racial science" of his day. Du Bois' study concluded that
the data supporting the suggested low brain weight of blacks had
been based on insufficient sources, as the total number of
African-American brains to have been measured and weighed prior to
this study was 500, and from this number scientific postulates were
applied to all persons of African ancestry throughout the West—some
20 billion persons.
An earlier work by Dr. Kelly Miller offered similar critiques of
published data, in his "A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and
Tendencies of the American Negro" (1897). Miller's paper focused on
the many errors in Frederick Hoffman's book, advancing the theory
that the data in Hoffman's work on rates of morbidity within the
black race were so randomly selected by Hoffman as to be completely
without scientific bearing. Perhaps most significant to the present
study was the publication in 1854 of Frederick Douglass' address,
"The Claims of the Negro Ethnographically Considered," in which,
while studying the similarities and disparities between "Caucasian"
and "Negro" craniums, Douglass initiated a line of enquiry that
contemporary scholars Stepan and Gilman have interpreted as one
single, compelling question: "What difference does difference
make?"
The answer from the scientific community of the day was that,
despite evidence to the contrary, the argument that blacks and
other "colored races" were inferior to whites was widespread during
the latter half of the nineteenth century. By the end of the early
1900s, many whites "believed that evolution had led the Caucasian
to intelligence, culture, and civilization, while the Negro had
progressed only very slowly or, possibly, even degenerated from
more successful ancestors" (Reilly, 7).
One significant focus of this paradigm of "natural superiority" was
the fear of miscegenation between white and colored persons. The
eugenicists' argument that the ever-increasing influx of immigrants
would weaken the Anglo-American gene pool provided part of the
intellectual, then political, rationale for the restrictive
Immigration Act of 1924. Not coincidentally, a vigorous
representation of state's involuntary sterilization laws were
enacted at the same time.
At the Second International Congress of Eugenics, which conferred
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City during
September 1921, experts in the fields of genetics, medicine, and
eugenics presented 108 papers. Of these, 55 addressed the
hereditary and social consequences of unions between persons of
different racial backgrounds (Reilly, 1991).
According to scholar Philip R. Reilly, M.D., J.D., author of the
1992 The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary
Sterilization in the United States, "The roots of
anti-miscegenation law are deeply set in the soil of American
history." Reilly traces this anxiety to as early as 1630,
when,
only a few years after Negroes were brought to Virginia, the
governor's council declared that Hugh Davis, a white man, was to be
whipped publicly for "abusing himself to the dishonor of God and
shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a Negro." In
1662, the state's general antifornication statute was amended to
include heavier penalties if the guilty parties had also violated
racial boundaries. In tracing Virginia legislative history (which
is typical of the South), one finds an unswerving preoccupation
with preserving those boundaries. A law enacted in 1787 declared
that "every person who shall have one-fourth part or more of Negro
blood shall be deemed a mulatto." There the color line held until
1910 when the state legislature, responding to increasing
intermarriage between whites and blacks, declared that any person
whose ancestry was one-sixteenth Negro was of that race. Many
[Anglo] Americans feared the dilution of the ancestral stock by
mulattos and blacks threatened the nation's future. According to
one authority, between 1890 and 1910, the "colored" population
increased by 81 percent, while the Negro population increased by
only 22.7 percent.
In Virginia, the legislature responded by passing legislation
titled "An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity." The key feature of
this law, the most powerful legal obstacle to interracial marriage
erected since the Civil War, was to define a "white" person as one
"who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian."
Officials charged with issuing marriage licenses were ordered not
to do so until they had "reasonable assurance that the statements
as to color of both man and woman are correct." Existing
interracial marriages were declared void regardless of the state in
which they had been licensed, and interracial cohabitation was
declared a crime. (72-73)
The one exemption from this anti-miscegenation policy was the
"Pocahontas exception," written in deference to those persons
claiming to be descendants of the union between Pocahontas and John
Rolfe. The exception permitted a white to marry "a person with
one-sixteenth or less of the blood of an American Indian"
(ibid.).
In Virginia, the task of implementing the new anti-miscegenation
statute fell to the state registrar of vital statistics, Walter
Ashby Plecker, a physician who by 1924 had published a number of
papers on public health and eugenics. Deeply committed to enforcing
the anti-miscegenation laws, Plecker's passion for retaining
"racial purity" came to the attention of Laughlin. Plecker wrote to
Laughlin to explain more about Virginia's laws, and detailed the
"Pocahontas exception," complaining that it created a loophole for
"remnants of our so-called Indians who have in reality lost their
identity by mixture with the Negroes" to transgress the color line.
To confront this breach, Plecker had affixed a "warning" to birth
and death certificates and marriage licenses that the Bureau of
Vital Statistics would reclassify as "'colored' any person either
of whose parents had been classified as 'Indian, Mixed Indian,
Mixed, Melungeum, Issue, Free Issue, or other similar non-white
terms" (letter to Laughlin, 1929).
Finally, in 1930, after extensive efforts,
Plecker convinced the Virginia legislature to amend its race
law so that "Every person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro
blood shall be deemed a colored person." This gave Plecker the
power to redefine the racial status of the "mixed" breeds that had
been attending white schools, and to banish the near-whites of
Negro extraction to black schools. He was especially interested in
reclassifying "Mongrel Virginians," a group of perhaps one-thousand
near-white "mixed breeds" who had organized to fight the new
law. (Reilly, 74)
Plecker's last letter to Laughlin spoke openly of the central
concerns of the anti-miscegenation legislation:
". . .I would feel somewhat easier about the matter if I
thought that these near-whites would not produce children with
Negroid characteristics. I have never felt justified in believing
that in some instances the children of mulattos are really white
under Mendel's law. At least I do not feel satisfied that we can
know in an individual case that such is the fact." Plecker's fear
that a white-skinned descendent of a Negro could bear children with
a brown skin color was widely held at the time. (Reilly,
78)
At the same historical moment, in 1930, the Harris Bill advanced
three arguments for the restriction of Mexicans from the U.S.:
widespread unemployment, racial undesirability, and un-Americanism.
Dr. Roy L. Garis, an authority on eugenics at Vanderbilt
University, prepared a report to the congressional committee. In
addressing this committee, Garis read from his report that "the
following statement made to the author by an American who lives on
the border seems to reflect the general sentiment of those who are
deeply concerned with the future welfare of this country:
Their [the Mexicans'] minds run to nothing higher than animal
functions--eat, sleep, and sexual debauchery. In every huddle of
Mexican shacks one meets the same idleness, hordes of hungry dogs,
and filthy children with faces plastered with flies, disease, lice,
human filth, stench, promiscuous fornication, bastardy, lounging,
apathetic peons and lazy squaws, beans and dried chili, liquor,
general squalor, and envy and hatred of the gringo. These people
sleep by day and prowl by night like coyotes, stealing anything
they can get their hands on, no matter how useless to them it may
be. Nothing left outside is safe unless padlocked or chained down.
Yet there are Americans clamoring for more of this human swine to
be brought over from Mexico.' (201)
Garis' source added that the only difference between Mexican women
of the lower and higher classes was that high-class Mexican women
were more "sneaky in adultery."
At the same hearings, a prominent Pasadena, California medical
doctor testified that: "The Mexican is a quiet, inoffensive
necessity in that he performs the big majority of our rough work,
agriculture, building, and street labor. They have no effect on the
American standard of living because they are not much more than a
group of fairly intelligent dogs." The repatriation of over 400,000
Mexicanos, between 1929 and 1937, effectively reversed earlier
immigration trends, in an effort to relieve expanding welfare rolls
during the Depression years. Social agencies throughout California,
as well as in Detroit, Indiana, Chicago, and Denver participated
with the Mexican government in the mass deportation of Mexican
nationals and their children, although many of these children had
been born in the United States and were thereby U.S.
citizens.
During the 1970s, the emphasis on eugenics took the form of
involuntary sterilization, which became a critical issue among
indigenous and other non-white women. Says historian Rodolfo
Acuña:
U.S. agencies in the Third World had routinely funded
sterilizations since the mid-1960s. One third of the women of
child-bearing age on the island of Puerto Rico had been sterilized,
and, from 1973 to 1976, over 3,000 Native Americans were surgically
sterilized. In the Los Angeles General Hospital, serving the
largest Mexican population in the United States, doctors routinely
performed involuntary sterilizations. According to Dr. Bernard
Rosenfeld, doctors developed the attitude that by sterilizing the
breeders, they saved the taxpayers millions of dollars in welfare
payments. Moreover, the USC/Los Angeles County Hospital, aka as the
General Hospital, was in the business of training doctors. Often
physicians persuaded teenagers to accept tubal ligations and
hysterectomies: 'I want to ask every one of these girls if they
want their tubes tied. I don't care how old they are. . . .
Remember everyone you get to get her tubes tied means less work for
some son of a bitch next time.' Some doctors bragged that they
waited to ask for permission to perform the operations as the
anesthesia wore off. Often English language forms were given to
patients who spoke only Spanish. Sterilization of poor minority
women became a national issue when two Black girls ages 12 and 14,
were sterilized in Montgomery Alabama. (395-96)
The ideological precepts of the eugenics movement had, in the end,
operated not only in the newspapers and courtrooms of the early
United States, but most urgently, and most literally, on the bodies
of women, children, and people of color. While the dialectic
tension between innocence and agency was carefully maintained
throughout this era, the deep ramifications of the removal from
power for these marginalized groups persists to this day. And, if
through the maelstrom of documentation a country was able to
effectively codify as "necessary," "vital," or "right" the
infliction of pain on the bodies of difference, recent documents
from the emerging canons authored by people of color may be
understood to be interrogating these models of representation,
through our own efforts at claiming place, worth, and, above all,
survival.
As Latinos, we are—no matter our color—indigenous to this
land. Mexicanos are indigenous to the red earth of the North
American continent. Puertorriqueños are indigenous to the island.
Peoples of the South American continent are indigenous to those
lands. Still. Y no nos moveran.
Canéla A. Jaramillo, Ph.D.
Linda Gordon,
Heroes of Their Own Lives: The
History and Politics of Family Violence. NY: Viking/Penguin, 1988.
Stepan, Nancy Leys and Sander L. Gilman. 1991. “Appropriating the
Axioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in
The Bounds of Race: Perspectives
on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick la Capra. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
For a particularly lucid discussion of this phenomenon of this
“tripartite” race consciousness in the United States, see Gary
Nash, “The Red, the White, and the Black,” in The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of
America, ed. Gary Nash.
Holt: 1970.
Reilly, Philip, M.D., J.D. 1991. The Surgical Solution: A History of
Involuntary Sterilization in the United States.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press. Citation on page 5.
Refer to the discussion earlier in this chapter of Linda Gordon’s
study Heroes of Their Own
Lives, The Politics and History of Family Violence.
N.Y. Viking Penguin, 1988. Further
works interrogating models of the early U.S. gender and family
systems appear in Appendix A.
Stepan and Gilman, 97.
Op cit., 95-96.
Commencement address before the literary societies of Western
Reserve College (Rochester, NY, 1854). Reprinted in Philip S.
Foner, ed., The Life and
Writings of Frederick Douglass, 5 vols. (NY: 1975) 2: 289-309. Interpretation
by Nancy Stepan and Sander Gilman in "Appropriating the Idioms of
Science," pp. 81 and 101. Emphasis added.
Waldington, "The Loving Case." In Reilly, op cit.
Menke, Mulattos and Race
Mixture, p. 39.
U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,
Western Hemisphere Immigration, H.R. 8523, H.R. 8530, H.R. 8702,
71st Cong., 2nd session, 1930], p. 436. Cited in Acuña, 1988, p.
201.
Quoted in Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California
Farmworkers, 1870 to 1941, p. 105; cited in Acuña, 1988, p.
201.