My Great Grandfather Antonio Alejo Aguilar with his First Wife

When I was ten years old, my great grandfather died.  He was ninety-six years old and had been one of the main objects of my affection since I was a toddler.  When we visited his house, he fed us cups of apricot nectar and regaled us with stories of his childhood in Mexico.  He told us about sucking the juice out of fresh cactus fruit, sneaking into the kitchen of his house and watching the maids cook, and attending medical school in Mexico City.  The stories from his adolescence were much darker.  When grandpa was sixteen, he had joined a regiment of federales and had fought in the Mexican Revolution.  A cannon ball came close enough to his head to shave off his hair, leaving him mostly bald for the rest of his life.  He also watched as Pancho Villa rode into one of the border towns of the United States and Mexico and shot a man he expected of sympathies with the Mexican government while the man?s wife bawled and cried for his life.  As a result of the stories that my grandfather told, I thought of him as being completely Mexican.  It was only after his death that I was realized how complicated that identity had been for him. 

Throughout his life, my grandfather had written poetry expressing his thoughts about immigrating to the United States and living as a Mexican man in small Idaho town.  After his death, my family gathered his poetry and published them as a small volume for the family to read.  A small coffee-stained copy of that volume lays on my coffee table at home.  My grandfather asked that his writings never be made publicly available or I would share excerpts here.  In his poetry, he expressed the difficulties that he had fitting in, in the United States.  As a man from the upper castes of Mexican society, he felt that his skin was too white to fit in with the Mexicans he knew and too dark for him to be considered white.  He saw himself as existing uneasily between races.

Reading his letters and writings made me more attuned to the ways in which racial identity is always constructed.  Although most Americans think of race as being something that is either/or, Mexican or white, Black or Indian, Asian or Pacific Islander.  The reality, however, is that people exist in-between these categories and that the categories themselves are constructed.  The malleability of racial categories became even more apparent to me as I undertook my graduate work.  Historians like Tiya Miles, Anne Hyde, and Martha Hodes have demonstrated that the racial tapestry of the United States is complicated.  The Cherokee adoption of chattel slavery in the nineteenth century created an Indian nation whose members included men and women whose heritage was a mix of African, Indian, and white ancestry.  Similarly, in the American West, the desire of fur traders to extend their influence caused them to take Indian wives whose familial connections provided them with access to wealth and resources.[1]

Initially, a variety of responses existed to relationships, even illicit ones, between white men and women and people of color.  As racial attitudes hardened in the nineteenth century and the ability to classify individuals using race, ethnicity, religion, and gender increasingly became a technology of power in imperial spaces, the existence of mixed race people became a problem for those involved in the project of classifying people.  Children who were neither white nor black, neither red nor brown, were a problem who wanted to argue that racial difference was natural and immutable.  The colonial project, however, did not just involve making divisions between white and non-white people.  It also involved making distinctions between black and brown people.  African Americans and Native Americans were treated as fundamentally different within nineteenth-century America, especially in regards to racial mixing.  In his article ?Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,? Patrick Wolfe argues that the fact that Native Americans stood in the way of white settlement and African Americans were a potential source of labor fundamentally changed the way that white settlers treated racially mixed children from each group.  Indigenous identity was seen as mutable? the more distant someone?s relationship to their native ancestors, the less likely it was that they would be identified as a Native American.  A single drop of African blood, however, rendered someone black and thus, a potential source of labor.[2]

As I have been reading the series this month, one of the things that has jumped out at me is how much we accept the categories that were once malleable as given.  Everyone knows what we are talking about when we talk about black history within the Mormon Church, or at least we think do.  The question of who should be included in the category of blackness, however, has not always been so clear.  Mormons have traditionally identified Pacific Islanders as being descended from the original group of Israelites who traveled to the Americas in the Book of America.  Whether that identity is Nephite or Lamanite is contested.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, it was not clear what the heritage of Pacific Islanders was.  Many contemporary commenters assumed that the people of the Pacific Islands could be classified into at least two categories: Polynesians who had lighter, copper-colored skin and Melanesians whose skin was almost black.  The Protestant missionary John Williams assumed that Polynesians were descended from an Asiatic people whereas the people of Melanesia were most likely descended from Africans.  Some even went as far as far to call the residents of Melanesia ?Polynesian negroes.?  Although most ethnologists separated Melanesians from Polynesians in the nineteenth century, others thought that both groups were a mixture of Asiatic and African blood.   This idea sometimes crept into Mormon thought and articles.  In 1897, for example, the Deseret Evening News published an article arguing that Polynesians were a mixture of different races and that some of the mixture undoubtedly came from African blood. The author, a Mormon living in Auckland, NZ, argued that the difference in skin color and facial features were similar to the variety found in Africa itself and evidence of the partial descent of Pacific Islanders from African peoples.  For the author, however, the presence of African blood did not diminish the fact that Pacific Islanders were descended from Israelites.  He ended his article by pointing to tattooing and Polynesian ideas about uncleanliness as evidence that the relationship between Polynesia and Israel was as close as that between Britain and America.

The origins of Pacific Islanders, especially Melanesians, were an open question.  Mormon leaders were uncertain how to treat men and women who had joined the church in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and New Caledonia.  The frequency of intermarriage between these people and Polynesians further complicated the question.  If someone who was Tongan married someone from Fiji, how should their children be classified and treated?  Should they be allowed into the temple and receive their endowments?  The question was equally complicated in other parts of the world.  In Brazil, for example, it was difficult to tell which individuals had African ancestry and which did not.  The Philippines also had a small population of people whose dark skins caused others to identify them as African.  Called the Negritos, considered darker than other Filipinos and had short, curly hair.  In 1958, David O. McKay decided that these people did not belong under the priesthood ban and could receive their temple endowments.  His decision effectively narrowed what had been an international issue to an American one.  It also simplified the category of blackness for Mormons.  When asked what is an ?African,? the answer essentially became a black person in the United States or someone from Africa.

Although McKay?s decision answered the question of who would count as African for white American Mormons, it doesn?t erase the fact that such decisions are arbitrary or when we talk about black history and focus on American stories that we are erasing the messiness of the question.