lying about one's ethnicity

[brigittebod]

OK, I have a young boy in the latter part of the 19th century in America. One of his parents is a Native American (tentatively identified as an Apache, or possibly one of the Pueblo People). If his father wanted to disguise this fact, what ethnicity would he claim the mother was?

Comments

[zenokarasu]

Okay, is this a trick question? You said one of his parents is a Native American. You didn't say which one!

[semi_sweet]

I'd go with French, Italian, Spanish, Greek...all ethnicies that tend to have dark eyes and hair, darker skin. It might be an ethnicity that there weren't too many of in those parts, so no one would have seen many Italians before.

[of_carabas]

Ditto to the Italian suggestion, especially from Southern Italy. Sicilians still get mistaken for all sorts of things - Cuban, Jewish, Iraqi, gypsies... pretty much whichever minorty is on people's minds. Native American would be believable.

[sars_elleb]

I'm Native American/German and I've had people ask me if I was Greek or Italian before.

To the OT: Just curious, but if one parent is Native American, is the other parent caucasian? Your post confused me a little.

[sars_elleb]

Nevermind. Note to self: never go online the second you wake up.

[badgermirlacca]

If this person is in the SW, I think it would be difficult to claim that the kid would be anything other than Indian or Mexican (and in Anglo circles, "Indian" and "Mexican" would amount to the same thing. Come to think of it, in Spanish circles it would also amount to the same thing). So what part of the country are you talking about? What is the context? If you're trying to introduce this kid into elevated social circles in Boston or New York it's a different issue than hanging out on a ranch in Texas, New Mexico, or California.

And then there's the problem of accent... where was the kid raised?

[mayhemwench]

Depending on the time period, Mexican would be FAR more acceptable in the Southwest than Apache. Pueblo would also be more acceptable than Apache, but less so than Mexican

[badgermirlacca]

Hon, I've lived in New Mexico for 43 years. IIRC, New Mexico History is still a required subject in schools around here.

My brother in law is Spanish (not Hispanic; not, God forbid, Mexican-American--Spanish). He was the one who told me, twenty years ago, "The Anglos look down on the Spanish. The Spanish look down on the Mexicans. Everybody looks down on the Indians--and the Indians look down on everybody, because they were here first."

I repeat: it depends on where you are, and when you are.

[badgermirlacca]

Which would be why I started out with the phrase "Depending on the time period..."? And talked about the mid to late 1800s and not the past 43 years?

And just for reference, I'm basing this on four years of studying primary source documents from 1580 to about 1890 from New Mexico and parts of Arizona for various theses for my history degree. I'd be happy to list them out, but it would take me a few days to find the photocopied title pages and lists in my filing cabinet, type them out and organize them so they're not just a random and ginormous list of doom.

Oh, and from California history, which, oddly enough, they teach here, where Mexican priests and ranchers were way higher up on the ladder than the Indians they were converting here, whether they had Indian blood themselves or not (and, when the 'Anglos' came, whether they were Catholic or not), at least before 1849 and the Foreign Miners' Tax.

Of course, my only anecdotal evidence of modern views on the subject comes from growing up in California and all that entails, and

[llewllynn]

Along the lines of the above comments on Italians, etc- it does depend on where. but Western Europeans would work, However still be careful (Italy being your best bet), If the people his father is protecting him from are ahrcore in hating native americans and the like, they'll probably hate anyone outside an infulential European country- So Romanians, Middle Easterns, Jews, Turks (even Greecians were pushing it)- weren't well loved by particularly the British for many years.

[imrihamun]

He would probably claim any appropriate ethnic identity (like the other suggestions) that had a large local population. Many people of diverse ancestry would do this in order to 'belong to' a larger minority support network and live among that community. Eg, some darker-skinned Carribean Islander-heritage people claimed African-American ethnicity in parts of the US South not because they'd avoid racism completely, but because they could become part of *some* community then.

I'd say look at where you have your kid settled and see what ethnic groups were already settling around there.