Chapter II
the Problem of Race

The gravity of the problem—The three races, European, Indian, and Negro—Their characteristics—The mestizos and mulattos—The conditions of miscegenation according to M. Gustave Le Bon—Regression to the primitive type.

The racial question is a very serious problem in American history. It explains the progress of certain peoples and the decadence of others, and it is the key to the incurable disorder which divides America. Upon it depend a great number of secondary phenomena; the public wealth, the industrial system, the stability of governments, the solidity of patriotism. It is therefore essential that the continent should have a constant policy, based upon the study of the problems which are raised by the facts of race, just as there is an agrarian policy in Russia, a protectionist policy in Germany, and a free-trade policy in England.

In the United States all the varieties of the European type are intermingled: Scandinavians and Italians, Irish and Germans; but in the Latin republics there are peoples of strange lineage: American Indians, negroes, Orientals, and Europeans of different origin are creating the race of the future in homes in which mixed blood is the rule.

In the Argentine, where Spanish, Russian, and Italian immigrants intermingle, the social formation is extremely complicated. The aboriginal Indians have been united with African negroes, and with Spanish and Portuguese Jews; then came Italians and Basques, French and Anglo-Saxons; a multiple invasion, with the Latin element prevailing. In Brazil Germans and Africans marry Indians and Portuguese. Among the Pacific peoples, above all in Peru, a considerable Asiatic influx, Chinese and Japanese, still further complicates the human mixture. In Mexico and Bolivia the native element, the Indian, prevails. The negroes form a very important portion of the population of Cuba and San Domingo. Costa-Rica is a democracy of whites; and in the Argentine, as in Chili, all vestiges of the African type have disappeared. In short, there are no pure races in America. The aboriginal Indian himself was the product of the admixture of ancient tribes and castes.

In the course of time historic races may form themselves; in the meantime an indefinable admixture prevails.

This complication of castes, this admixture of divers bloods, has created many problems. For example, is the formation of a national consciousness possible with such disparate elements? Would such heterogeneous democracies be able to resist the invasion of superior races? Finally, is the South American half-caste absolutely incapable of organisation and culture?

Facile generalisations will not suffice to solve these questions. Here the experience of travellers and of American history even is of greater value than the verdicts of the anthropologists. In the first place the half-breeds are not all hybrids, and it is not true that the union of the Spaniard and the American has always been sterile. Hence the absolute necessity of understanding the proper character of each of the races which have formed modern America.

The Spaniards who arrived in the New World came from different provinces; here alone is a prime cause of variety. Simultaneously with the languid Andalusian and the austere Basque, the grave Catalonian and the impetuous Estremaduran left Spain. Where the descendants of the Basque prevail, as in Chili, the political organism is more stable, if less brilliant, than elsewhere, and a strong will-power shows itself in work and success. The Castilians brought to America their arrogance, and the fruitless gestures of the hidalgo; where the Andalusians are in the majority their agile fantasy, their gentle non curanza, militates against all serious or continuous effort. The descendants of the Portuguese are far more practical than those of the Spaniards; they are also more disciplined and more laborious. The psychological characteristics of the Indian are just as various; the descendant of the Quechuas does not resemble the descendant of the Charruas, any more than the temperament of the Araucanian resembles that of the Aztec. In Chili, Uruguay, and the Argentine, there were warlike populations whose union with the conquerors has formed virile half-castes, an energetic and laborious plebs. In Chili Araucanians and Basques have intermingled; and is it not in this fusion that we must seek the explanation of the persistent character of the Chilian nation, and its military spirit? The Aymara of Bolivia and the south-east of Peru is hard and sanguinary; the Quechua of the table-lands of the Andes is gentle and servile. It is by no means a matter of indifference whether the modern citizen of the Latin democracies is descended from a Guarani, an Aztec, an Araucan, or a Chibcha; he will, as the case may be, prove aggressive or passive, a nomadic shepherd or a quiet tiller of the common soil.

The Indian of the present time, undermined by alcohol and poverty, is free according to the law, but a serf by virtue of the permanance of authoritative manners. Petty tyrannies make him a slave; he works for the cacique, the baron of American feudalism. The curé, the sub-prefect, and the judge, all-powerful in these young democracies, exploit him and despoil him of his possessions.[1] The communities, very like the Russian mir, are disappearing, and the Indian is losing his traditional rights to the lands of the collectivity. Without sufficient food, without hygiene, a distracted and laborious beast, he decays and perishes; to forget the misery of his daily lot he drinks, becomes an alcoholic, and his numerous progeny present the characteristics of degeneracy. He lives in the mountains or table-lands, where a glacial cold prevails and the solitude is eternal. Nothing disturbs the monotony of these desolate stretches; nothing breaks the inflexible line of the limitless horizons; there the Indian grows as melancholy and as desiccated as the desert that surrounds him. The great occasions of his civil life—birth, marriage, and death—are the subjects of a religious exploitation. Servile and superstitious, he finally loves the tyrannies that oppress him. He adores the familiar gods of the Cerros, of the mountain. He is at once a Christian and a fetish-worshipper; he sees in mysterious nature demons and goblins, occult powers which are favourable and hostile by turn.

There are, nevertheless, regions where despotism has developed in the Indian a sort of passive resistance. There he is sober and vigorous, and by his complete adaptation to the maternal soil he has grown apathetic and a creature of routine. He hates all that might destroy his age-long traditions: schools, military training, and the authority that despoils him. Conservative and melancholy, he lives on the border of the Republic and its laws; his heart grows hot against the tyranny from which he forever suffers. Dissimulation, servility, and melancholy are his leading traits; rancour, hardness, and hypocrisy are the forms of his defensive energy. He supports his slavery upon this cold earth, but he sometimes revolts against his exploiters; and at Huanta and Ayoayo he fought against his oppressors with true courage, sustained by hatred, as in the heroic times of Tupac-Amaru.[2] After this bloody epic he resumed his monotonous existence under the heedless sky. In his songs he curses his birth and his destiny. In the evening he leaves the narrow valley where in his slavery he is employed in agricultural labours, to journey into the cerros and mourn the abandonment of his household gods. A weird lamentation passes over the darkening earth, and from summit to summit the Cordillera re-echoes the sorrowful and melodious plaint of the Indian as he curses conquest and warfare.

The negroes of Angola or the Congo have mingled equally with the Spaniard and the Indian. The African woman satisfied the ardour of the conquerors; she has darkened the skin of the race.

The negroes arrived as slaves; sold a usanza de feria (as beasts of burden), they were primitive creatures, impulsive and sensual. Idle and servile, they have not contributed to the progress of the race. In the dwelling-houses of the colonial period they were domestics, acting as pions to their masters' children; in the fields and the plantations of sugar-cane they were slaves, branded by the lash of the overseer. They form an illiterate population which exercises a depressing influence on the American imagination and character. They increase still further the voluptuous intensity of the tropical temper, weaken it, and infuse into the blood of the Creole elements of idleness, recklessness, and servility which are becoming permanent.

The three races—Iberian, Indian, and African—united by blood, form the population of South America. In the United States union with the aborigines is regarded by the colonist with repugnance; in the South miscegenation is a great national fact; it is universal. The Chilian oligarchy has kept aloof from the Araucanians, but even in that country unions between whites and Indians abound. Mestizos are the descendants of whites and Indians; mulattos the children of Spaniards and negroes; zambos the sons of negroes and Indians. Besides these there are a multitude of social sub-divisions. On the Pacific coast Chinese and negroes have interbred. From the Caucasian white, bronzed by the tropics, to the pure negro, we find an infinite variety in the cephalic index, in the colour of the skin, and in the stature.

It is always the Indian that prevails, and the Latin democracies are mestizo or indigenous. The ruling class has adopted the costume, the usages, and the laws of Europe, but the population which forms the national mass is Quechua, Aymara, or Aztec. In Peru, in Bolivia, and in Ecuador the Indian of pure race, not having as yet mingled his blood with that of the Spanish conquerors, constitutes the ethnic base. In the Sierra the people speak Quechua and Aymara; there also the vanquished races preserve their traditional communism. Of the total population of Peru and Ecuador the white element only attains to the feeble proportion of 6 per cent., while the Indian element represents 70 per cent. of the population of these countries, and 50 per cent. in Bolivia. In Mexico the Indian is equally in the majority, and we may say that there are four Indian nations on the continent: Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

In countries where the pure native has not survived the mestizos abound; they form the population of Colombia, Chili, Uruguay, and Paraguay; in this latter country Guarani is spoken much more frequently than Spanish. The true American of the South is the mestizo, the descendant of Spaniards and Indians; but this new race, which is almost the rule from Mexico to Buenos-Ayres, is not always a hybrid product. The warlike peoples, like those of Paraguay and Chili, are descended from Spaniards, Araucanians, and Guaranis. Energetic leaders have been found among the mestizos: Paez in Venezuela, Castilla in Peru, Diaz in Mexico, and Santa-Cruz in Bolivia. An Argentine anthropologist, Señor Ayarragaray, says that "the primary mestizo is inferior to his European progenitors, but at the same time he is often superior to his native ancestors." He is haughty, virile, and ambitious if his ancestors were Charruas, Guaranis, or Araucanians; even the descendant of the peaceable Quechuas is superior to the Indian. He learns Spanish, assimilates the manners of a new and superior civilisation, and forms the ruling caste at the bar and in politics. The mestizo, the product of a first crossing, is not otherwise a useful element of the political and economic unity of America; he retains too much the defects of the native; he is false and servile, and often incapable of effort. It is only after fresh unions with Europeans that he manifests the full force of the characteristics obtained from the white. The heir of the colonising race and of the autocthonous race, both adapted to the same soil, he is extremely patriotic; Americanism, a doctrine hostile to foreigners, is his work. He wishes to obtain power in order to usurp the privileges of the Creole oligarchies.

One may say that the admixture of the prevailing strains with black blood has been disastrous for these democracies. In applying John Stuart Mill's law of concomitant variations to the development of Spanish America one may determine a necessary relation between the numerical proportion of negroes and the intensity of civilisation. Wealth increases and internal order is greater in the Argentine, Uruguay, and Chili, and it is precisely in these countries that the proportion of negroes has always been low; they have disappeared in the admixture of European races. In Cuba, San Domingo, and some of the republics of Central America, and certain of the States of the Brazilial Confederation, where the children of slaves constitute the greater portion of the population, internal disorders are continual. A black republic, Hayti, demonstrates by its revolutionary history the political incapacity of the negro race.

The mulatto and the zambo are the true American hybrids. D'Orbigny believed the mestizo to be superior to the descendants of the Africans imported as slaves; Burmeister is of opinion that in the mulatto the characteristics of the negro are predominant. Ayarragaray states that the children born of the union of negroes with zambos or natives are in general inferior to their parents, as much in intelligence as in physical energy. The inferior elements of the races which unite are evidently combined in their offspring. It is observed also that both in the mulattos and the zambos certain internal contradictions may be noted; their will is weak and uncertain, and is dominated by instinct and gross and violent passions. Weakness of character corresponds with a turgid intelligence, incapable of profound analysis, or method, or general ideas, and a certain oratorical extravagance, a pompous rhetoric. The mulatto loves luxury and extravagance; he is servile, and lacks moral feeling. The invasion of negroes affected all the Iberian colonies, where, to replace the outrageously exploited Indian, African slaves were imported by the ingenuous evangelists of the time. In Brazil, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and Peru this caste forms a high proportion of the total population. In Brazil 15 per cent. of the population is composed of negroes, without counting the immense number of mulattos and zambos. Bahia is half an African city. In Rio de Janeiro the negroes of pure blood abound. In Panama the full-blooded Africans form 10 per cent. of the population. Between 1759 and 1803 642,000 negroes entered Brazil; between 1792 and 1810 Cuba received 89,000. These figures prove the formidable influence of the former slaves in modern America. But they are revenged for their enslavement in that their blood is mingled with that of their masters. Incapable of order and self-government, they are a factor of anarchy; every species of vain outer show attracts them—sonorous phraseology and ostentation. They make a show of an official function, a university title, or an academic diploma. As the Indian could not work in the tropics black immigration was directed principally upon those regions, and the enervating climate, the indiscipline of the mulatto, and the weakness of the white element have contributed to the decadence of the Equatorial nations.

The mulatto is more despised than the mestizo because he often shows the abjectness of the slave and the indecision of the hybrid; he is at once servile and arrogant, envious and ambitious. His violent desire to mount to a higher social rank, to acquire wealth, power, and display, is, as Señor Bunge very justly remarks, a "hyperæsthesia of arrivism."

The zambos have created nothing in America. On the other hand, the robust mestizo populations, the Mamelucos of Brazil, the Cholos of Peru and Bolivia, the Rotos of Chili, descendants of Spaniards and the Guarani Indians, are distinguished by their pride and virility. Instability, apathy, degeneration—all the signs of exhausted race—are encountered far more frequently in the mulatto than in the mestizo.

The European established in America becomes a Creole; his is a new race, the final product of secular unions. He is neither Indian, nor black, nor Spaniard. The castes are confounded and have formed an American stock, in which we may distinguish the psychological traits of the Indian and the negro, while the shades of skin and forms of skull reveal a remote intermixture. If all the races of the New World were finally to unite, the Creole would be the real American.

He is idle and brilliant. There is nothing excessive either in his ideals or his passions; all is mediocre, measured, harmonious. His fine and caustic irony chills his more exuberant enthusiasms; he triumphs by means of laughter. He loves grace, verbal elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form; great passions or desires do not move him. In religion he is sceptical, indifferent, and in politics he disputes in the Byzantine manner. No one could discover in him a trace of his Spanish forefather, stoical and adventurous.

But is unity possible with such numerous castes? Must we not wait for the work of many centuries before a clearly American population be formed? The admixture of Indian, European, mestizo, and mulatto blood continues. How form a homogeneous race of these varieties? There will be a period of painful unrest: American revolutions reveal the disequilibrium of men and races. Miscegenation often produces types devoid of all proportion, either physical or moral.

The resistance of neo-Americans to fatigue and disease is considerably diminished. In the seething retort of the future the elements of a novel synthesis combine and grow yet more complex. If the castes remain divided there will be no unity possible to oppose a probable invasion. "Three conditions are necessary," says M. Gustave Le Bon, "before races can achieve fusion and form a new race, more or less homogeneous. The first of these conditions is that the races subjected to the process of crossing must not be too inequal in number; the second, that they must not differ too greatly in character; the third, that they must be for a long time subjected to an identical environment."

Examining the mixed peoples of America in conformity with these principles we see that the Indian and the negro are greatly superior to the whites in numbers; the pure European element does not amount to 10 per cent. of the total population. In Brazil and the Argentine there are numbers of German and Italian immigrants, but in other countries the necessary stream of invasion of superior races does not exist.

We have indicated the profound differences which divide the bold Spaniard from the negro slave; we have said that the servility of the Indian race contrasts with the pride of the conquerors; that is to say, that the mixture of rival castes, Iberians, Indians, and negroes, has generally had disastrous consequences. Perhaps we may except the fortunate combinations of mestizo blood in Chili, Southern Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Finally, the territory has not yet exercised a decisive influence upon the races in contact. The modern Frenchman and Anglo-Saxon are born of the admixture of ancient races subjected for centuries to the influences of the soil. The great invasions which modified the traditional stock took place a thousand years ago; they explain the terrible struggles of the Middle Ages. The new American type has not so long a history.

In short, none of the conditions established by the French psychologists are realised by the Latin-American democracies, and their populations are therefore degenerate.

The lower castes struggle successfully against the traditional rules: the order which formerly existed is followed by moral anarchy; solid conviction by a superficial scepticism, and the Castilian tenacity by indecision. The black race is doing its work and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism.

This retrogression constitutes a very serious menace. In South America civilisation is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white man over the mulatto, the negro, and the Indian. Only a plentiful European immigration can re-establish the shattered equilibrium of the American races. In the Argentine the cosmopolitan alluvium has destroyed the negro and mitigated the Indian. A century ago there were 20 per cent. of Africans in Buenos-Ayres; the ancient slave has now disappeared, and mulattos are rare. In Mexico, on the other hand, in 1810 the Europeans formed a sixth part of the population; to-day they do not form more than a twentieth part.

Dr. Karl Pearson, in his celebrated book National Life and Character, writes: "In the long run the inferior civilisations give proof of a vigour greater than that of the superior civilisations; the disinherited gain upon the privileged castes, and the conquered people absorbs the conquering people." He declared further that Brazil would quickly fall into the power of the negroes, and that while the Indians would multiply and develop in the inaccessible regions of the north and the centre, the white peoples, crowded out by the progress of these races, would be numerous only in the cities and the more salubrious districts. This painful prophecy will be accomplished to the letter if, in the conflict of castes, the white population is not promptly reinforced by the arrival of new colonists.

But crossing alone will not communicate the superior characteristics of the race to the mestizo in a lasting manner. "It is necessary that he should be the fruit of a union of the third, fourth, or fifth degree; that is, that there should have been as many successive crossings, with a father or a mother of the white race, before the mestizo can be in a condition to assimilate European culture," writes an Argentine sociologist. For this vast process of selection to be realised to the profit of the white man not only must the races subjected to admixture exist in certain proportions, but the mass of Europeans must prevail and impose their temper upon the future castes. In short, the problem of race depends upon the solution given to the demographic problem. Without the help of a new population there will be in America not merely a lamentable exhaustion but also a prompt recoil of the race. The phrase of Alberdi is still true: "In America to govern means to populate."

The colonists brought with them the traditions and manners of the disciplined races, a moral organisation which was the work of centuries of common life. People of rural extraction, when they reached America, upheld the established interests, the government, the law, and the peace; they worked, fought, and laid up treasure. Moreover, only the most enterprising of men emigrated, and they transmitted to the new democracies an element of vitality they had not before known. As early as the second generation the descendants of the foreign colonists were already Argentines, Brazilians, or Peruvians; their patriotism was as ardent and devoted and exclusive as that of their fathers. They completely adopted the local manners. They had been transformed by the action of the American environment.

Basques or Italians have already transformed the Argentine. They arrive as artisans, or labourers, or clerks and traders; they form agricultural colonies and become landowners. They soon break their fetters; their sons become merchants, financial agents, or wealthy plutocrats. Of 1,000 inhabitants there are 128 Italians and only 99 Argentines who own land. These Latins are prolific; in 1904 1,000 Argentine women gave life to 80 infants; 1,000 Spanish women to 123, and 1,000 Italian women to 175.[3] These immigrants thus increase the national wealth and people the desert.[4] Moreover, their descendants figure in politics and letters. Let us mention only a few Argentine names remarkable on one count or another: Groussac, Magnasco, Becher, Bunge, Ingegnieros, Chiappori, Banchs, and Gerchunoff.

[1] The Indianista Society in Mexico and the Pro Indigena in Peru were founded for the protection and rehabilitation of the Indians.

[2] The Bolivian sociologist, A. Argüedas, writes of the Aymara Indians: "They are hard, rancorous, egotistic, and cruel. The Indian herdsmen have no ambition other than to increase the number of the heads of cattle which they pasture."

[3] V. Gonnard, L'Emigration européenne au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1906, p. 220 et seq.

[4] To understand the significance of immigration, it is enough to remark that there are in Mexico 7 inhabitants per square kilometre, in Brazil 1.7, in the Argentine 1.6, while there are 72 in France, 105 in Germany, no in Italy, 120 in England, and 248 in Belgium.