Who Is Black, White, or Mixed Race? How Skin Color, Status, and Nation Shape Racial Classification in Latin America

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America's Barometer survey, the authors examine patterns of self-identification in four countries. National differences in the relation between skin color, socioeconomic status, and race were found. Skin color predicts race closely in Panama but loosely in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, despite the dominant belief that money whitens, the authors discover that status polarizes ðBrazilÞ, mestizoizes ðColombiaÞ, darkens ðDomin-ican RepublicÞ, or has no effect ðPanamaÞ. The results show that race is both physical and cultural, with country variations in racial schema that reflect specific historical and political trajectories.Throughout the Americas, the idea of race has commonly been used to make social distinctions, especially regarding persons of African origin.

Exit over Voice in Dominican Ethnoracial Politics

“…Because many self-identified mulattos belonged to middle and upper classes, Howard suggested that they could absorb the social consequences of identifying with more marginalized categories. These findings echo recent conclusions by Simmons (2009) and by Telles and Paschel (2014). In the case of the Dominican Republic, Telles and Paschel found that "high-educated Dominicans were nearly four times as likely to identify as mulatto when compared to low-educated Dominicans…" In that survey, interviewers used a more "objective" eleven-point skin color palette to categorize respondents.…”

“…Using a combination of these attributes provided greater leverage than using a single attribute, even if that attribute is skin color. Skin color is a strong predictor of ethnoracial identification in many countries in Latin America (Telles and Paschel 2014). But it is a weaker predictor of ethnoracial identification in the case of the DR, specifically (Telles and Paschel 2014, 884 67 The percentage of respondents who self-identified as white in the AB surveys was 12.78 in 2006, 13.94 in 2008, 9.58 in 2010, and 12.5 in 2012. The table shows that Afro-descendants were elected either to the Senate or to the COD (or both) in the 2006-2010 and 2010-2016 legislative periods across these provinces, except in Peravia.…”

“…State institutions, socio-demographic characteristics, and visible attributes may limit them. Telles and Paschel (2014) point out that ethnoracial classification in Latin America varies widely in the region. In some countries, such as the Dominican Republic, classification is indeterminate and lacks correspondence between external categorization and self-identification.…”

“…Nation-building processes in the post-independence period in Latin America did much to discourage identification with a primary ethnoracial group identity (Hanchard 1994;Bailey 2009;Telles 2014). They also helped to stymie collective action along ethnoracial lines.…”

“…Panama had the highest percentage of self-identified blacks (14%), followed by the Dominican Republic (10%), Brazil (10%), Colombia (7%), and Costa Rica (3%) (Telles and Paschel, 2014).…”