Mestiza

“ Will the American Negro, especially the city Negro, acquire his share through hard work and thrift? Will young Negroes quit the poolrooms with their debasing effects and march into usefulness and comfort on the land? Will the Negro seek the signs of civilization—the automobile and the dress suit—and miss civilization as it is represented in the home and the bank account? Will the Negro forego some pleasures today so as to enjoy richer treasures tomorrow? Will the Negro allow others to think and plan for him instead of thinking and planning for himself? ”

“ Sir, is there not yet hatred enough between the races which compose your southern population and the population of Mexico, their next neighbor, but you must go back eight hundred or a thousand years, and to another hemisphere, for the fountains of bitterness between you and them? ”

“ You will notice that I have taken as my title, “Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro and Their Economic Interpretation.” Now it is somewhat misleading at this day and time to speak of the negro as a “folk.” That word seems to me to be applicable only to a people living in an industry in which economic function has not been specialized. So it would be more accurate to speak of “negro class lore.” The class that I am treating of is the semi-rural proletariat. ”

“ The mestizos who live among the whites and intermarry with them class themselves with them whenever their economic position permits. Dwelling in remote regions and in villages among the Indians they tend to revert to the Indian type. Until they acquire wealth they form the artisan element, the traders, and the shopkeepers. ”

“ Wherever Negroes colonize in the cities or villages, North or South, wherever the hod-carrier, the porter, and the waiter are the society men of the town; wherever the picnic and the excursion are the chief summer diversion, and the revival the winter-time of repentance.... Wherever laughter and tears rub elbows by day, and the spirit of labour and laziness shake hands, there—there—is Happy Hollow. ”

“ Thus, from a small beginning​—​from a few black slaves gathered together by night beneath the roof of a white man​—​this society has spread far and wide, like some huge wave, until now it boasts a vast increase of number, of every variety of shade, from the ruddy son of Britain, down to the jetty offspring of Afric’s soil. ”

“ An important, though numerically small, element in the population of the larger cities are the mestizos, or half-breeds, the result of admixture either between the Chinese or the Spanish and the natives. These mestizos occupy about the same social position as the mulattos of the United States. But they are the richest and most enterprising among the native population. ”

“ In this address I said that the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not he should make himself, through his skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived that the community could not dispense with his presence. ”

“ We recognize more sufficiency in the European mestizo and the Sangley or Chinese mestizo, than in the pure-blooded Indian; and the mestizos of those races are the ones who distinguish themselves, some notably, as authors, advocates, physicians, canons, and among other literary professions, in which not one single pure-blooded Indian has been found. ”

“ Do you think the wretched Indians, who, since the discovery of the New world, are burried in the mines of Peru, are also naturally insensible, because they suffer patiently?
You calumniate nature in making her grant favours to particulars; in giving her a system of inequality among her offspring. All men are cast in the same mould.--The varieties which distinguish individuals, are the sports of chance, or the result of different circumstances; but the black comes into the world with as much sensibility as the white, the Peruvian, as the European. ”

“ Civilization, or the social condition of man, is the result and test of the qualities of every race. The benefit of this blood mixture, the negro is never to enjoy on this continent. In the South where he is raised, in the North, East, or West, it is all the same, no new blood is to be infused into his sluggish veins. ”

“ It is often urged, though falsely, by the American Slaveholders and their abettors, that the Negro race does not possess, to the same degree as the white race, those strong social feelings and filial affections which lay at the foundation of human society; the essential elements and spontaneous out-growth of our nature. The potent ligaments of the whole social fabric. And as these qualities are developed, man ascends higher in the scale of intellectual, moral, social, and religious being. ”

“ To explain the practical significance of these figures let me repeat what was said in an earlier chapter, that the mestizos and whites are, for political and social purposes, practically one class and that the ruling class, the Indians being passive, and in a political sense outside the nation. Even in Paraguay, an almost purely Indian state, the comparatively few mestizos dominate politically. In Brazil it is the whites who rule, but many of them are tinged with negro, fewer with Indian, blood. ”

“ By destroying the relation between the two races, the improvement of the condition of the colored people, now so rapidly going on, and by which they had been, both physically and intellectually, and in respect to the comforts of life, elevated to a condition enjoyed by the laboring class in few countries, and greatly superior to that of the free people of the same race in the non-slaveholding states, would be arrested ”

“ When peoples of the same race mingle by migration, the effect, as regards classes, depends chiefly on their [Pg 221] states of civilization and the character of the migration, as hostile or friendly. The peaceful advent of kindred settlers, like the English immigrants to the United States, creates no class divisions. ”

“ What is the condition of the laborers in your section?
—A. The laborers in the Mississippi Valley are agricultural. But few whites are employed; they soon become landowners or tenants. Your question, therefore, reduces itself to, What is the condition of the negroes? I should say good, as compared with a few years ago, and improving. You must recollect that it has only been 18 years since the negroes emerged from slavery without a dollar and with no education, and that for generations they had been taught to rely entirely upon others for guidance and support. ”

“ If I did not believe the negro was capable of sufficient development to make him a responsible small farmer, I should not want to remain in the business that I am any longer, because I believe that the development of my business is necessarily based upon the development of the negro and the cultivation of my lands. ”

“ For a regulation had been sent to India that no mestiço of India should be given pay or subsistence: for, as it was laid down, it was their duty to serve for nothing, seeing that they had their houses and heritages in the country, and being on their native soil were bound to defend it."—Correa, iv. 580. 1552.—"... the sight of whom as soon as they came, caused immediately to gather about them a number of the natives, Moors in belief, and Negroes with curly hair in appearance, and some of them only swarthy, as being mistiços."—Barros, I. ii. 1. ”

“ Occasionally in letters and family diaries, written up to a hundred or more years ago, we read of a native man, woman, or youth being employed as a house-servant. The pitiable waifs, the objects of a feeble relenting and a strong anxiety, all under guardianship, living on the remnants of the family table, sleeping in out-buildings, mixed with negro blood, were miserable relics of the native race. ”

“ Of slaves, I shall speak by and by more at large; these are Africans, creole negroes, mulattos, and mestizos. The maxim of the civil law, partus sequitur ventrem, is in force here as well as in the colonies of other nations. [199]
These several mixtures of the human race have their shades of difference of character as well as of colour. First we must treat of the whites. The Europeans who are not in office, or who are not military men, are, generally speaking, adventurers who have arrived in that country with little or no capital. ”

“ Humanity, as far as it has the hardihood to dwell here, is confined to the Indian or the mestizo, who has paid nature the homage of being born here, and so can dwell and work in what is his native environment. ”

“ There a circumscribed population of negro race has had a political and social and religious organisation and the elements of higher culture impressed upon it by Europeans, in the belief that it would be possible to construct a social environment which would mould the people. ”

“ In every village of the intermediate valleys, the white vagabond and roguish mestizo have “padrinos,” or protecting friends of their own caste in petty authority, holding the commission of captain of volunteers, governor, or alcalde, or something more [159] subordinate still; but the more industrious Indian, who tills his own piece of ground, and peaceably labours to rear his little group of helpless children, is constantly the victim of oppression. ”

“ But it is a racial, almost a historical, phenomenon that these same younger sons who go under in the far places colonized by their own countrymen, make often supremely good when circumstance forces them to live and work amongst either inferior peoples, as in Africa, or a people of a different civilization and culture, as in Asia. ”

“ We have in our midst Negroes who have a superior adaptation to the labor of the fields, and it is to our interest and to the interests of mankind generally, that they be treated properly, as in their humble way they do this their share of the world's work. ”

“ The slaves had their select classes in the house servants and the artisans. After freedom came, the Negro made four distinct efforts to reach economic safety. The first effort was by means of the select house-servant class; the second, by means of competitive industry; the third, by land-owning; and the fourth, by what I shall call the group economy.
First, let us look at the effort of the house servants. The one person under the slave régime who came nearest to escaping from the toils of slavery and the disabilities of caste was the favorite house servant. ”

“ As to the character of the population it is estimated that 40 per cent are of white extraction, with at least 50-60 per cent mestizos; probably 50,000 Indians, including possibly 5000 in the far south, uncivilized and dying out. The educated class as in other countries forms a small minority of the inhabitants, but in recent years greater attention has been paid to the diffusion of knowledge among the common people. ”

“ We quite sympathize with the determination of the white inhabitants of these Colonies which are in comparatively close proximity to millions and hundreds of millions of Asiatics that there shall not be an influx of people alien in civilization, alien in religion, alien in customs, whose influx, moreover, would most seriously interfere with the existing rights of the labour population. ”

“ Here are wealth, aggregations of intelligence, and a surplus of the educated labor class. Commodious and often beautiful edifices shelter the bright tribes whom the morning bell calls together beneath the eye of cultured teachers. ”

“ The social heritage of the Negro has been described at great length and often with little regard for fact, by hundreds of writers. Only a glance can be given the subject here, but it may profitably be asked what the Negro did when he was left to himself in Africa. ”

“ The negro race, by this time nearly extinct (except in Buenos Ayres) , has left, in its zambos and mulattoes, a link which connects civilized man with the denizen of the woods. This race mostly inhabiting cities, has a tendency to become civilized, and possesses talent and the finest instincts of progress. ”

“ Some Parent or Wife who had not an opportunity of mingling tears in a parting embrace! Perhaps some Infant or aged Parent whom his labour was to feed, and vigilance protect! and himself under the dreadful apprehensions of perpetual Slavery.”
To inforce this part of the head, allow me, Reader, to intrude a little upon your time, by giving you a short account of the barbarous usage these poor Negroes meet with from their Masters in the West-Indies and Southern Provinces of North-America ”

“ There was little to fear from the passive Indian, but everything from the middle race, the mestizos, that mixture of activity and indolence, of brightness and dreaminess, insincerity and selfishness, in whose ever-growing strength rests the future of the country. ”

“ These individuals all spell negro with a capital and declare that they are proud of their race. They parade its achievements—and these are not small when enumerated all at once—but they avoid intimate association with the great mass of negroes. ”

“ It exhibits three distinct phases, each with a culture peculiar to itself, lying back of civilization, and back of the Upper Status of barbarism, having very little in common with European society of three hundred years ago, and very little in common with American society of to-day. Its institutions, inventions, and customs find no analogues in those of civilized nations, and cannot be explained in terms adapted to such a society. ”