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Old Mix Americans

Tiffany Trump (the less well-known "other" child), whose ancestry includes "non-white" Locklears of the Lumbee people

Tiffany Trump (the less well-known “other” child), whose ancestry includes “non-white” Locklears of the Lumbee people

 

An Old Mix American is a person with many of their direct ancestral lines already present in the Americas by the 1600s.

Old Mix Americans are characterised by having multiple ancestral lines derived from non-European population groups – people who would have usually been considered “non-white” or “persons of color” under the British colonial (and later US American) racial caste system.

It is important to note that many of these “persons of color” also arrived from Europe.  Many European Romani and Jewish people, for example, were often perceived by the dominant “white” caste as “non-white”.

The majority of Old Mix Americans are now found scattered throughout the USA and often choose to present as “white”, following decades of intermarriage with European-Americans.

Many population groups ancestral to Old Mix Americans still survive in rural places where the European-American influence has been less pronounced, and each community or extended kinship group has its own unique ethnic history.

The largest and most well-known Old Mix American groups include the Lumbee of North Carolina, the Redbones of Louisiana and Texas, and the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia.

Often described as “tri-racial isolate” communities under American “race” classifications (which traditionally only allowed for “white”, “black”, and “indigenous” categories), the ancestry of these groups can include people from a myriad of backgrounds – indigenous North American, indigenous South American, indigenous Caribbean, North African, sub-Saharan African, Jewish, Malagasi, Sami, Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Romani, East Indian, and Asian.

Paint Me A Picture

Cigano (Portuguese Romani) Slave Traders, 19th century Brazil [painting by Debret]

Cigano (Portuguese Romani) Slave Traders, 19th century Brazil [painting by Debret]

Painters, not unlike musicians or actors, need patrons or a paying audience.

This might seem obvious, but it has a direct bearing on how we view history.

English society has been notoriously class-conscious since the first Norman warlords began erecting their stone fortresses – aka castles – among the peoples of England after 1066.

These Normans/Northmen (of Normandy in France) were really just “Frenchified” Vikings with a serious superiority complex after spending a few generations away from their Northern homelands.

Their “Viking French” became the language of the ruling classes in Britain, and this legacy survives right down to the present day, even in American English.

When we want to sound educated, we tend to use words evolved from the French language.

When we want plain talk, we tend to use words evolved mostly from Saxon English.

Think of the difference between saying “an illuminated chamber”, or “a well-lit room”.

But I digress (or “wander off-path”, if we avoid French usages here).

Our deeply-ingrained sense of social class, for much of history, dictated what was deemed worthy of recording.

In the age before affordable photography, only very few people could afford to pay a trained artist for a portrait or painting.

The peasantry, the underclasses, and the poor were only rarely subjects for the artist’s brush – they simply couldn’t pay for such a service.

So art as a paid occupation – in the age before social realism – was generally concerned with portraiture of the ruling classes, landscapes, religious themes, and the documentation of “great events” – with only a few noteworthy exceptions.

*****

I invite any reader here to fire-up a search engine, and attempt to locate contemporary images of the American working classes and underclasses from any time before the mid-19th century.

Paintings, etchings, drawings, anything.

You will find precious little.

What is more, by the time American painters DID decide to paint scenes from the lives of frontierspeople and common people, America as a whole was already actively, aggressively engaged in curating its own myth.

Think of George Caleb Bingham‘s 1852 painting of Daniel Boone leading “white settlers” through the Cumberland Gap – a painting made over 80 years after the events it sought to portray.

Yet even before Daniel Boone had crossed the mountains into “Ken-te-ke“, people of mixed ethnicity from the Virginia and Carolina backcountry had been hunting and trading among the Indians in both Kentucky and Tennessee.

Later generations would refer to this mixed crew as “Melungeons“, and begin to construct a dubious mythology around them, as if the existence of free “brown people” were a mysterious affront to the natural order.

Yet there was little mystery to it.  Since the time of first European contact, the underclasses in North America had been intermixing with one another.

Spaniards, Portuguese, Portuguese Jews, Romani, Irish, Scots, Welshmen, Finns, Germans, Poles, Swedes, Dutchmen and Frenchmen.

Intermixing with Malagasy, Africans, Caribbeans, South Asians, Arabs or “Moors”, Yuchi, Catawba, Lenape, Pamunkey, Cherokee, Shawnee – you name it, they were all there in the first melting pot.

Yet we see none of these mixed or “brown” families represented in the story of the “American frontier”, and they are almost never represented in art.

This is where it gets a little ticklish and complex, because there ARE early American drawings of “non-white” people in scenes such as slave markets and slave auctions, or indigenous peoples shown in obsequious postures of “the vanquished”, or in romanticized portrayals of “noble savages”.

Yet the presence of these people in contemporary art was almost incidental, with the indigenous and enslaved treated more like props than human subjects.

This is because America was happy to portray “The Three Americas” which underpinned the racial caste system – Black, White, Indian – but only if the use of “non-white props” served a supremacist narrative.

Anyone who was not “Black” (and thus unfree), anyone who was not “Red” (and thus savage), became by default and by design, “White” – and thus free.

White, Savage, or Slave. With very few exceptions, when speaking of freeborn citizens, “Brown” was simply not an option.

*****

As we’ve already suggested, most artists in 16th and 17th century class-conscious colonial America painted what they deemed to be “worthy” subjects – or at least subjects who could afford to pay them.

In other words, the “white” merchant classes, religious leaders and elites.

So decades and centuries of art mostly portrayed only three groups of people at best – well-to-do “whites”, enslaved “blacks”, or “Indians”.

Needless to say, the brown and impoverished underclasses rarely sat for painters who worked mostly in large coastal towns and cities.

For their own futures and safety, the mixed-ethnic brown underclasses were usually pressing ever westward, or keeping to the hills and hollers, swamps and backwoods…

In the post-Revolutionary years, (as many American artists began to turn their faces away from “elite” subjects and to the historical men and women who were deemed worthy of remembrance as nation builders), painters could no longer conceive that the American frontier was actually settled in large part by “brown people”.

Yet it was.

And we can prove it by examining early camera lucida drawings and photographs, reading court and census documents, and cross-referencing folklore and DNA.

*****

The paintings shown here were made by a French gentleman in early 1800s Brazil, a man named Debret.  An unusual man with an early, almost anthropological fascination with the “non-white” peoples of Brazil.

The one above shows the house of Portuguese Cigano “Gypsy” slave traders in Rio de Janeiro.   The one below shows what are probably “Genizaro” or mixed-ethnic slave traders marching Guarani captives to market.

Slave Traders in 19th Century Brazil, possibly Genizaros [painting by Debret]

Slave Traders in 19th Century Brazil, possibly Genizaros [painting by Debret]

What does this have to do with Anglo-American history?

SIMILAR SCENES WERE OCCURRING FROM MAINE TO SOUTH CAROLINA TO LOUISIANA TO TEXAS TO CALIFORNIA, even if we are not lucky enough to have had a painter like Debret working in such places.

Catholic Spanish and Portuguese America saw people of mixed ethnicity as existing on a spectrum of “casto”.

Protestant Anglo-America, perhaps due to a more simplistic Manichean view of things, tried desperately to reduce much of the world into binaries.  Good/evil.  Black/white.

Artificial binaries were good for defining real humans versus “property”.  Free versus unfree.

But humans refuse to slot into ridiculous and arbitrary categories.

American “folk heroes” like Jim Bowie were trading with mixed-ethnic pirates for slaves among the mixed-ethnic communities of the Gulf Coast before Texan “independence” from Mexico.  “Gulf of America”, indeed…

Jewish slave merchants operated out of Maryland, Rhode Island, and Charleston, with households often comprised of “free people of color”.

Many indigenous American tribes had become drawn deeply into this sordid trade, and many people of African origin became absorbed into tribal communities like the Seminole, Cherokee, and Choctaw.

Métis communities and mixed-ethnic “prairie bandits” lived for decades on the lands which would only later become the Louisiana Purchase.

And all of these people (who were often brown to begin with) “co-mingled” endlessly, thus creating an even larger brown American underclass – an unsung and largely forgotten part of America – some of whom would spend decades, centuries, attempting to cross the color bar into “whiteness”.

 

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