I had a friend who was Puerto Rican and proud of her family’s roots in Spain. Her skin was as light as mine and although she took pride in her Puerto Rican heritage, she always mystified me with her way of referring to one segment of the island’s population.
The first time she talked about “tainos,” I thought she was mentioning an exotic segment of Puerto Rico’s population complete with a separate culture and dialect. It turned out she was referring to residents who lived in countryside areas off the beaten path and even hard to reach by car.
The main differences between these backcountry dwellers and other Puerto Ricans turned out to be their poor economic status and the color of their skin.
Tainos had darker skin than my friend and many other Puerto Ricans I saw during a visit to the island. My friend and her friends referred to them in an off-handed and humor-inflected way that left me with unanswered questions. Were tainos people who fit neatly into my assumption about backwoods islanders living on their hereditary land or were they a subclass dealt an economically-disadvantageous hand because of their skin color?
The closest I got to answer to my questions was the reply, “Well, that’s the way things have always been.”
Look up a definition of “taino” online and you get “indigenous people of the Caribbean.” By the time I traveled to Puerto Rico, I had already visited Mexico and Guatemala twice and I knew not everyone in those countries looked alike and that economic differences underscored by cultural differences meant you found quechua people tracing their ancestry to the Mayans living in Guatemala’s interior and more European-looking people living in the cities.
I didn’t need a passport to get an introduction to the connection between classism and colorism. Reading African-American literature and talking to a person of color would have enlightened me about prejudice and skin color gradations in the United States.
Online source The Root, quoted by the National Conference for Community and Justice, cited research that found that light-skinned women were sentenced to approximately 12 percent less time behind bars than their darker-skinned counterparts.
The 1970s middle school history and civics books I was taught from spun the narrative “white is might and right” in their chronicles of European colonization in the Americas and Africa.
Spanish and Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, Belgian and German names were slapped onto broad swaths of territory and the result was a class stratus with white intruders presumptively sitting at the top.
Colonization placed European invaders in cities and fortified harbor towns and relegated people of color subjugated by whites to the countryside or slums. Dark-skinned people were branded with names like taino and considered country people or rural dwellers like the quechua people in Guatemala.
French West Africa, Belgian Congo and British Guiana are gone. But the stratified bias founded on skin color discrimation is alive and well and ready to serve as a convenient means of bias denying people equal opportunities.
