Teasing, Just Teasing

Lowell Gudmundson

Mount Holyoke College

No Central American family fails to distinguish among its children, cousins, brothers and sisters, between those darker and those lighter, those with straighter and those with curlier hair. Straight hair can be either "good" or "bad," depending on what one is seeking to deny or distance (an Indian heritage of straight hair or an African one of curly hair), but color, while also invoked in complex forms, is not so contextually relative, as lighter is always better, regardless of where darkness may be presumed to have its origins. Here, however, the blow is softened, and nearly inverted when cast in the feminine form of address, by the ubiquitous use of terms of endearment only very loosely tied to appearance or phenotype, such as "negra, negrita, morena, morenita." While diminutives for males can offend every bit as much in Central America as in the U.S. South, with its infamous use of "boy" to address grown Black men, the female diminutives also run the risk of offending if they are seen as overly familiar address or as an unwelcome suggestion of sexual attraction or availability.

Terms of endearment, then, also have a darker, less endearing history. Since many of the early peoples of mixed race were, whether recognized or not, the blood relatives or "outside children" of the so-called Spanish colonizers and rulers, the fact that in the vast majority of cases their common forebearer was the father of the free household, rather than the free, enserfed, or enslaved mother(s), casts a long shadow over our understanding today of such expressions of affection. However, an even longer, more somber shadow emerges when one recognizes the echo of Colonial practices and anxieties in the seemingly most harmless of contemporary expressions and experiences.

Indeed, what could be more harmless than a doting uncle teasing his favorite niece, "la negrita" of the family, in response to the adolescent's curiosity as to where her darker color, compared to her cousins, came from? Why, from her father of course, the darkest of his generation of siblings. But why was he darker than his brothers and sisters? Rather than attempting some sort of quixotic explanation of genetic variation, the uncle chose to tease his niece by telling her that her father had been one of the "Black" railroad workers in town long ago and had been adopted by her grandparents! A tale so ludicrous as to lead to the expected laughter on the part of the young girl. Her immediate response, "oh, stop teasing me," may have put an end to the story but hardly to the many deep-seated anxieties about "family matters" brought to the surface in this anecdote.

Such was the basic story line of a family affair cum legend recounted to me by Guatemala's former Minister of Education, Aracely Judith Samayoa Godoy de Pineda, author of the classic study of the history and customs of Amatitlán, her home town and that of her forebearers for many generations.(1) As anywhere else in the world, these bittersweet adolescent moments with their memories of her father, Eladio Samayoa Peralta, and other departed relatives yet today spark smiles, laughter, and nostalgia, but also misgivings and a touch of sadness. However much intended to soften the blow of darkness, or to make light of it, a deeply-rooted set of insecurities in a very color-conscious world connect in the present back to a Colonial world of far less playful or harmless sibling rivalries.

Eladio Samayoa Peralta (1931)	The Samayoa Peralta family (1923)

Aracely as a fifteen year-old with her parents (1958)	Father and daughter at Aracely's wedding (1966)

One such Colonial sibling rivalry may suggest just how those fears tied to color consciousness came to be. In late eighteenth-century Costa Rica the Ulloa family faced a particularly tortured generational transition that lead them to the halls of justice, the probate and appeals court system, where justice and compassion were in equally short supply.(2) Manuel Alfonso de Ulloa Siles had the bad fortune of surviving by several decades the death (1744) of his wife, María Josefa Maroto, and the bad judgement to have postponed the settling of her estate with their four "legitimate" children, Pedro, Petronila, Juana, and Francisco (Ulloa Maroto) until they were not only middle-aged but impatient. Pedro, the eldest, actually sued his father in 1779 to force an accounting. His father agreed to comply, but the subsequent case quickly revealed the reasons for the decades-long delay. Manuel Alfonso had also fathered a number of children with his wife's slave girl, Juana Josefa Maroto, beginning in 1742 when she was only 18 and her mistress was still alive, with whom he had continued to cohabit all these years and now hoped to free along with their children.

Their free siblings ("half" brothers and sisters biologically, raised in the same household, however formally unequal) and the Colonial secular authorities had other ideas. For the estate to account for and honor the deceased mother's property contributions to the marriage, and to provide saleable goods for the division, their siblings needed to remain enslaved and form part of the probate inventory. Rather than expressing compassion for the desparate situation the old man now found himself in, the authorities heaped scorn on his "weaknesses" and failings, preferring to maintain the appearance of propriety while tolerating the manifest injustice of siblings selling each other to settle accounts! When Manuel Alfonso made the desparate and futile attempt to free his illegitimate "white mulatto" children by publicly admitting his parentage he called to testify to the truth of those claims two of his own brothers, Pedro Nolasco and Nicolás (Ulloa Siles), and two of his legitimate children, Pedro and Francisco. Since his son Pedro had initiated the demand, he would hardly be a supportive witness, but none of the others could testify to anything other than that they knew them to be slaves born to a slave mother, owned by their deceased sister-in-law/mother. Thus, as should have been obvious to the desparate father and no doubt was to those he called to testify, the authorities would have no alternative but to include the illegitimate slave children (now adults) as property to be divided, reversing any previous grant or promise of freedom made by their father/master.

Public propriety had apparently been saved and scandalous "private family matters" safely buried by the authorities. However, the institutional imperatives of secular support for slavery and property rights were not the whole story here. Where the secular authorities disdained mere sworn testimony on paternity, their ecclesiastical counterparts accepted the very same declarations as truthful when responding to requests by the enslaved siblings for marital dispensations based on consanguinity. Moreover, the very same uncles and siblings whose civil testimony appeared to confirm the slaves' fate reappear as sponsors and providers of funds with which to purchase freedom as these "lesser" siblings were about to marry. And the consanguinuity issues were indeed pressing, since Petronila would free her half-sister María de la Encarnación in order that she marry her first cousin, Tomás Cayetano Ulloa Guevara, the legitimate son of the uncle, Pedro Nolasco, whose testimony failed to save her freedom in the civil process. Likewise, all four legitimate heirs/siblings acknowledged being paid the value of their slave half-sister, María Josefa de la O, by her fiancé, José de Díos Ulloa Guevara, Tomás Cayetano's brother and thus another first cousin spouse. Lorenzo, another of the enslaved siblings, would eventually marry his uncle Pedro Cayetano Ulloa Siles's widow, Ana Eusebia Sáenz Guillén, making his aunt his wife. Clearly, this was a clan where property rights and rank might take precedence, or where overt challenges to them such as the pleas of Manuel Alfonso to civil authorities were seen as pointless, but any lingering color prejudice against the "mulato blanco" half-siblings did not prevent their marriage to free kin.

There were, however, far less happy endings in this byzantine family affair. Unlike the three slave siblings, María de la Encarnación, María Josefa de la O, and Lorenzo, who were both freed and married free kinsmen, four of their brothers and sisters, Eusebia, Cayetana, José Antonio, and María Francisca were sold away by their sibling masters, at least two of them to owners in far-off León, Nicaragua. The constant combination and juxtaposition of kin and master/slave terms in our descriptions is not only intended to highlight the transparently bad faith claims made by Colonial authorities for the separation of public and private realms. It reveals just how fundamentally dependent both spheres were on an underlying racist patriarchalism, albeit one with disastrous consequences for this negligent and repentant patriarch and his children/slaves. The critique of such hypocritical standards on the part of civil authorities would be echoed forcefully in the nineteenth-century debates over the limited rights of "outside" or "illegitimate" children in inheritance proceedings. As the famous Guatemalan historian and jurist Lorenzo Montúfar so caustically put it, the State was pointlessly trying to correct the errant ways of the parents by punishing the children!(3)

From such bitter family matters arose a color consciousness that lives on in a multitude of forms at all social levels in Central America. How else to explain the obsession with color and phenotype evident even among family members far removed from both the Colonial past and the desparate struggle for survival inherited by so many descendants of slaves in the Isthmus today?. In the contemporary Guatemalan example which began our reflections, an uncle's teasing response to color anxieties fits in well with his niece's succinct view of things: "we all know we are of mixed origins; for people with a certain level of education or culture, it is not a problem or something to be hidden." For Aracely Samayoa, acceptance of and pride in one's ancestors, whatever their color or condition, is the only certain antidote to the anxieties susceptible to teasing. However, far too many Central Americans remain trapped in the color-conscious world of a half-remembered Colonial past of kinship compromised or denied by slavery and racial inequality, heirs to the convoluted but ultimately sad example of the Ulloas in Costa Rica. Thankfully, the Samayoa clan did not suffer the same class of sibling rivalries, even when they too spanned as many shades of skin color as decades visible in the photograph below.

The Samayoa clan (Aracely seated in front) celebrating their aunt's 104th birthday (2002)

(1) Amatitan, tradiciones (Guatemala: Textos Didácticos de Guatemala, third edition, 2004)

(2) For the details of the Ulloa family see Mauricio Meléndez Obando and Tatiana Lobo Wiehoff, Negros y blancos, todo mezclado (San José: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, 1997), pp. 128-34.

(3) Cited in Lowell Gudmundson and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Central America, 1821-1871: Liberalism Before Liberal Reform (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), p. 118, note 45.