Neither White nor Black: The Representation of Racial Identity Among Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the U.S. Mainland

Abstract

How is racial identity represented in an Afro-Hispanic Caribbean nation like Puerto Rico? And how do racial and ethnic categories shift in the diaspora? In 1990 I directed an ethnographic study of the sociocultural causes of the census undercount in Barrio Gandul, a poor urban community in Santurce (Duany et al., 1995). At the beginning of our fieldwork, my colleagues and I asked our informants: “What race do you consider yourself to belong to?” Responses to this seemingly innocuous question ranged from embarrassment and amazement to ambivalence and silence: many informants simply shrugged their shoulders and pointed to their arms, as if their skin color were so obvious that it did not need to be verbalized. When people referred to others’ race, they often used ambiguous euphemisms (such as “he’s a little darker than me”), without making a definite commitment to a specific racial label. Sometimes they would employ diminutive folk terms like morenito or trigueñita (referring to dark-skinned persons), which are difficult to translate into U.S. categories. For the purposes of this research, it seemed culturally appropriate to collect our impressions of people’s phenotypes as coded in Hispanic Caribbean societies such as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. However, this procedure left open the question of the extent to which the researchers’ racial categories coincided with the subjects’ own perceptions.

This chapter is a revised and abridged version of a paper presented at “The Meanings of Race and Blackness in the Americas: Contemporary Perspectives,” a conference held at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, February 10–12, 2000. I thank Suzanne Oboler and Anani Dzidzienyo for their kind invitation to present this paper, and for their fine suggestions to revise it for publication. Lillian Torres Aguirre and Roberto R, Ramírez provided access to census data on race among Puerto Ricans on the island and in the United States. Isar Godreau, Juan José Baldrich, riene Torres, Louis Herns Marcelin, Marvin Lewis, and Maria Zielina offered useful comments to strengthen my argument. Amílcar Tirado invited me to present the paper at the Documents and Maps Collection of the library at the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico on May 1, 2001. A longer version of this essay was published as chapter 10 of my last book (Duany, 2002).