The Racial Dangers of Travel: White at Home, Black Abroad

Lowell Gudmundson

Mount Holyoke College

From the earliest days of Independent life Central American elites have spared no effort to convince both themselves and foreigners that their Spanish heritage predominates. Failing that, the next line of racial self-defense has consistently invoked a Spanish-Indian mixed heritage, whether called mestizo, ladino, or Hispanic. Blackness was a category reserved for Atlantic coast others, for Caribbean island "lesser peoples," or for off-color jokes about each other in the safety of elite circles of rumor and courtship. And yet, remarkably, each time that a nation, group of people, or individual marshalled the courage to proudly proclaim their non-Blackness to the neighborhood and to the world, foreign travel, whether to the South or to the North, carried with it the risk of having that pedigree challenged in the most unsavory ways, from comical to deadly serious. Central Americans high and low, white supremacists or devotees of the mestizo "cosmic race," have for decades collided with the color line when traveling abroad, for the first time falling on the wrong side of the black/white divide they may well have defended at home. Three examples of this arresting remaking of race via travel invite the viewer's reflection.

Rubén Darío remains Nicaragua's and Central America's both favorite and prodigal son, virtually the only Isthmian figure recognized worldwide. Part of that recognition involved expressions of support, however, for reigning imperial prejudices, particularly anti-Black ones. At home Darío published texts that obliquely praised U.S.-inspired segregationism in Colón, Panama as contributing to "public health," that dismissed all things Black and African as primitive, and that even employed the stock-in-trade character of the hyper-sexualized Black female, as in his "La Negra Dominga y El Porvenir."(1) And yet, one can only wonder whether it was all so simple -and simply white supremacist- in light of his oft-cited musings on his own racial background in Prosas profanas: "Is there in me a drop of African blood, of Chorotegan or Nagrandano Indian blood? It could be, in spite of my hands of a Marquis."(2) A quite different, more critical reading might be ascribed to these expressions when we realize that Darío's travels to Chile as a young man led him to comment bitterly on his exclusion from elite social circles based on their perception of him as a mulatto, beneath polite society in this most Southern of American societies! And try as they might, photographers and portrait painters could not entirely exorcise Darío's part-African heritage, as can be seen in the three, life-course images offered below.

Darío at 31 in 1898	Darío at 41 in 1908	Darío at 47 in 1914

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As the rock-solid barriers of anti-Black racism began to fall, first in the United States in the 1950s and in South Africa a generation later, Central Americans abroad continued to encounter their own shifiting color line, without having to travel to the homelands of apartheid. Just as Darío's eye-opening experience took place in Chile rather than in the far northern or southern Atlantic worlds of negrophobia, for Guatemalans it might be enough to travel to neighborning Mexico to be reminded of the fact that one's own favorite myths at home lost currency with a trip no farther than to the Aztec capital. The former Minister of Education of Guatemala, Aracely Judith Samayoa Godoy, recounts how her father, Eladio, used to become apoplectic when shopkeepers would insinuate their disdain for the traveling family by asking, through wide smiles, whether they were not, perhaps, visitors from "Curacao" (that is to say, someone whose Spanish may have been too good to be from the island, but whose color was not good enough to be accepted as of Spanish descent). In the family album images below, no great effort is required to identify just what their Mexican tormentors had fixed upon, a visibly African heritage at odds with acceptance as respectable fellow Hispanics or mestizos in transit.

Eladio Samayoa Peralta (1931)	Aracely with her parents at age 15 (1958)

If both Chile and Mexico represented a "danger zone," however mild, for those of African heritage, with the emergence of mass migration from all Isthmian nations to the United States after the 1970s, countless Central Americans of a new generation ran up against an entirely new and rigid color line that brutally reversed the advantages many had come to expect at home. With or without any elaborate intellectual analysis, it fell to the children of this new diaspora to see their reflections most clearly in this two-way mirror. Our daughter, Paula, was one such dual citizen observer. Born in Costa Rica, she accompanied her parents every two or three years in their travels between the U.S. and Costa Rica. At "home" in Costa Rica she had always been identified with the most contradictory and inventive expressions, far more likely to be considered white when accompanied by her father alone, far more likely "morenita" when with her mother. And as important as her perceived color was her hair color and texture, so that having her hair tied back, as in the second passport picture below, contributed directly to a lighter color or racial identification. Costa Ricans confounded by the reality before them, or perhaps seeking to flatter the parents, could artfully combine their imageries by admiring the "morenita pero machita" (typically Costa Rican diminutive word choices for "dark-skinned but blond").

Paula with her parents (1978)	Passport photos (1978, 1981)	Paula and Darryl at Costa Rica Academy (1991)

This dual citizen experience, however, also revealed a set of common anti-Black preferences and prejudices, despite the vast differences in color terminology and "color lines." When her brother, Darryl, then a ten year-old, had difficulties in adapting to a new middle school in Massachusetts after a semester at Costa Rica Academy, with the vast experience of her fourteen years an exasperated Paula lectured him on "race" at home and abroad, for them an endlessly revolving door. : "Wake up! There in Costa Rica, in that private school with all your international classmates, they took you for white, right? But that wasn't so for your cousins there, even though they were the same color, right? Don't kid yourself, since those taken for Black here are the Puerto Ricans, how do you think they'll take you? Black, latino, twice Black!"

In one home, nationality and social class compensated for color or "bad" hair, but that did not extend to cousins without the dual passport advantage. In the other home, the "one drop of Black blood and you are Black" standard also made use of social class, even if here to reinforce the logic of its racial inferiority rules. But in both homes the preference, neither hidden nor solely implicit, was the same: one, two or more drops, the fewer the better! While mixed-race Central Americans abroad have only recently found themselves in the "twice Black" category of the U.S., even their closest neighbors have seen an African heritage where none was visible at home. Central Americans of mixed race would indeed do well to heed the wisdom of children, waking up from their comforting cosmic race dream, an image embracing all colors, save the darkest one.

(1) For examples of Darío's anti-Black writings see, Carlos Castro Jo, "Raza, conciencia de color y militancia negra en la literatura nicaragüense," Wani: Revista del Caribe Nicaragüense, No. 33 (April-June 2003), pp. 21-32.

(2) For Darío's Afromestizo heritage see, Mauricio Meléndez, "Presencia africana en familias nicaragüenses," in Rutas de la esclavitud en Africa y América Latina, Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001, pp. 347-9.