Falling between the pigeonholes

April 2002

When I was in college during the years of affirmative action and the civil rights movement in the U.S., I became aware of the ethnic classifications-Afro-American, Amerindian, Oriental, Caucasian, and Hispanic-that are fixed in American culture. I learned these classifications rather late; in my homogeneous hometown, the most ethnic group was the Zaza family who ran the local pizza parlor.

From my liberal perspective, this kind of categorizing seemed the best of a bad thing. If discrimination came from pigeonholing, then why not use these groupings to reverse discrimination? After all, people had their identity firmly linked to such classifications; to ignore such classification would be to "whiten" minorities into American mainstream culture. From my small town WASP perspective, these classifications seemed straightforward. But as in most things, the simplicity came from the distance. Up close the classifications become murky and so, too, the identities.

From an American perspective, our research group in Acre would be considered multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. A black Cuban physicist studies climate change. A Peruvian descendent of the Andean Huanca tribe measures the effect of forest fires. Another Peruvian working on river basin management has Hispanic, Indian, and African roots; when she tans, she turns a dark shade of brown. Our biomass specialist comes from German stock that migrated to southern Brazil; he has to avoid the sun because his skin is so white. The others of our group are mostly Acreans, which means a mix of Portuguese, Indian, and African backgrounds in varying proportions. One of the original cast had a father who came directly from Japan, and another has roots in the Middle East.

Sometimes the classification fits like socks on a rooster. Alejandro is a descendent from Africans abducted into slavery and was raised on a tropical island. Elsa's ancestors battled Incas in the cold, rarified Andes. The only things that they have in common is Spanish as a mother tongue and being part of the same research group; yet they are lumped together as "Hispanic."

These classes also depend on who is looking. The mother of our economist comes from the Apurinã indigenous group and he considers himself an Apurinã. One day he showed me a photo of an elderly woman, apparently indigenous, holding up an identity card with her picture on it. Our economist noted that because she has an identity card, she would no longer be considered indigenous by her tribe. For the same reason, he, too, wasn't considered Apurinã by the Apurinã tribe, even though he visited his cousins frequently. Mainstream Brazilians treat him frequently as an "Indian," which means as an inferior. He himself considers himself "Indian," but with pride. His tribe, however, classifies him as white.

A friend of mine has a visage and crispy hair that clearly show African roots. She has suffered discrimination by being classed as a Negro. Yet her darker skinned uncle wouldn't take her to an organizational meeting of Negroes in Rio de Janeiro because her color wasn't dark enough. In the States she would be "black." In Brazil she is a mulata (mixed), neither black nor white.

When I learned to classify people into ethnic groups during college days, the goal was purportedly to create a better society. Perhaps such classification is inevitable, but the human cost can be high, especially when one's identity falls between the pigeonholes.

©Woods Hole Research Center, 2008