The article The Hidden History of Mestizo America was written by history professor Gary B. Nash to inform readers about the history of mestizo people. The word mestizo is used in a broad sense to cover all different types of mixed race people. The reasoning behind various historic interracial marriages, classifications of mestizo people, and the cultural and historical impact are discussed. The article begins in 1617 when King James I and Queen Anne’s guests at a performance distracted the audience entirely. The guests were John Rolfe and Rebecca, better known as Pocahontas. They had the very first recorded interracial marriage in American history, explaining the audience’s astonishment. The Rolfe-Pocahontas marriage took place because
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After ten years of bloodshed between the Europeans and the Algonquian tribes, enough was enough. This interracial marriage was not looked upon negatively. King James I however did wonder how a commoner, John Rolfe, could be married to Pocahontas, the daughter of the prominent chief Powhatan. I believe that King James just thought Pocahontas was out of John Rolfe’s league. His opinion is understandable because Kings and Queens back then would not marry someone they believed was below their noble class.
The article then jumps to the late 1700s mentioning that most of the colonies, with North Carolina being the exception, did not see any reason to ban intermarriage between Europeans and Native Americans. It was working for them, and they did not want to make any changes. Thomas Jefferson for example was all for intermarriage between English and Native Americans. During Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, he expressed that he strongly believed in intermarriage. He had even made a promise to Native American chiefs that intermarriage will happen, and mixed raced people will soon spread all about America. We then take a jump to 1809, and are introduced to Sam Houston, a child that runs away to go …show more content…
It was very typical that these people were married to Native American women, and was important to their success in the fur trading industry. African American slaves seeking refuge would hide with the Native Americans, whom intermixed to create another type of mestizo people. By 1830 around a fourth of all Cherokee people were a mixed race. The Cherokee tried to protect their bloodlines by banning intermarriages with African Americans, and were unsuccessful. In the early twentieth century Sikhs from Punjabi immigrated to be laborers in California, where interracial marriages were prohibited at the time. By the end of World War I some Sikhs had discovered they could marry people of other races if their skin color was similar, like the Mexicans for example. In all actuality, there was not that many Punjabi-Hispanic marriages, but they have an amazing marriage loophole that is usually hidden in history. With no law banning interracial marriage, the history of Spanish and African mixing prevails. A set of famous paintings called Las Castas classifies a Spanish-Indian couple produces what is called a mestizo, Mestizo-Spanish a castizo child, African-Spanish a mulatto, Spanish-Mulatto a morisco, a Morisco-Spanish a chino or albino, and so on. These widespread paintings showed these people in everyday settings, to hopefully portray
After ten years of bloodshed between the Europeans and the Algonquian tribes, enough was enough. This interracial marriage was not looked upon negatively. King James I however did wonder how a commoner, John Rolfe, could be married to Pocahontas, the daughter of the prominent chief Powhatan. I believe that King James just thought Pocahontas was out of John Rolfe’s league. His opinion is understandable because Kings and Queens back then would not marry someone they believed was below their noble class.
The article then jumps to the late 1700s mentioning that most of the colonies, with North Carolina being the exception, did not see any reason to ban intermarriage between Europeans and Native Americans. It was working for them, and they did not want to make any changes. Thomas Jefferson for example was all for intermarriage between English and Native Americans. During Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, he expressed that he strongly believed in intermarriage. He had even made a promise to Native American chiefs that intermarriage will happen, and mixed raced people will soon spread all about America. We then take a jump to 1809, and are introduced to Sam Houston, a child that runs away to go …show more content…
It was very typical that these people were married to Native American women, and was important to their success in the fur trading industry. African American slaves seeking refuge would hide with the Native Americans, whom intermixed to create another type of mestizo people. By 1830 around a fourth of all Cherokee people were a mixed race. The Cherokee tried to protect their bloodlines by banning intermarriages with African Americans, and were unsuccessful. In the early twentieth century Sikhs from Punjabi immigrated to be laborers in California, where interracial marriages were prohibited at the time. By the end of World War I some Sikhs had discovered they could marry people of other races if their skin color was similar, like the Mexicans for example. In all actuality, there was not that many Punjabi-Hispanic marriages, but they have an amazing marriage loophole that is usually hidden in history. With no law banning interracial marriage, the history of Spanish and African mixing prevails. A set of famous paintings called Las Castas classifies a Spanish-Indian couple produces what is called a mestizo, Mestizo-Spanish a castizo child, African-Spanish a mulatto, Spanish-Mulatto a morisco, a Morisco-Spanish a chino or albino, and so on. These widespread paintings showed these people in everyday settings, to hopefully portray