TRIGUEÑOS: PUERTO RICAN SKIN COLOR AND RACIAL LANGUAGE

My sister Nila, Tía Pancha, Abuela Teresa, Tía Geña, Abuela Juana, my cousin Victoria and others are/were considered trigueños by Puerto Rican linguistic standards: olive complexion, dark skin and hair; product of the mestizaje that most Puerto Ricans admit as their heritage; including how they value and talk about it. For those educated in the USA on issues related to codifying racial language, the Puerto Rican significants and signifiers are quite different from the ones formulated and used up North, even when cognates are used to write or talk about skin color, race, class and their intersections. During the 19th Century, “trigueños” were known and officially classified as “pardos” by the “sistema de Castas” ruling the crumbling Spanish colonial empire; influencing laws and social values. 

My sister Nila also knew that being “trigueñitos” was part of a prism through which we were viewed and appreciated by the rest of the family, neighborhood, island where we grew up, and the place that word  occupied -and continues to do so- in the hierarchy that makes up intra Puerto Rican social and political relations.. As a kid, she used to say, while smiling -and I smiled back- to me, “Tú y yo somos los más trigueñitos de la familia”. Then we would classify each member of the family according to as many categories as possible: “jabaos, prietos, perfilados o gruesos, los que tenían raja o no, coloraos, jinchos, los que cargaban consigo la mancha de plátano.” 

My sister’s clear conscience on skin color and its related values provided me, when I was around 12 years old, a lesson on class and humanity, that went directly into my most inner affective and intellectual structures. We were walking up “la cuesta de Carioca” when she saw a very well known woman in Guayama, with a job -the town’s cheapest prostitute- and nickname that would scare the hell out of most people: La Mecánica. Nila told me that she had been in the hospital where La Mechanic was also interned, and she wanted to know about the woman’s health. Those early exercises on classification, valuing, motives, and similar anecdotes with my sister provided me with the basis that later on served me in my college and academic career when studying related social and academic topics in the fields of education and mass media.

“Trigueña de ojazos negros, pícaros, fascinadores...” is a popular Latin American (Mexican, perhaps) song that praises the color of the mestizo and its place in the culture, a complex web of codes, meanings, narratives and lexicon that has been thoroughly studied and written about by quite a few Latin American intellectuals, artists and musicians. From the 17th Century on, painters have been engaged in the visual genre known as “Pinturas de Castas”, showing in their canvas a view of the new mestizo world in Latin America; intellectuals have built a literary corpus covering the subject on the the use and understanding of skin color and racial language; how it has evolved, and the different historical coordinates that might differentiate it from the ones in the USA.  The particular coordinates that led a bard to sing to the “trigueña de ojazos negros” and asked her, “ámame mucho que así amo yo”.