Kathleen Deagan on Ethnic Stews

The distinctions in Anglo-American and Ibero-American self-identity persist today. While few Anglo-Americans openly acknowledge either American Indian or African components in their sense of cultural identity, most Latinos do. Since at least the early part of the twentieth century, Latin American literature, poetry, art, music, and popular culture have acknowledged and celebrated the multiple European, American, African, and Asian roots of contemporary society.

Archaeology’s contribution to the ongoing efforts to understand American origins and cultural identity has been in the discovery of patterns and processes in the households of people who otherwise reside at the margins of history but who, nevertheless, shaped colonial American society in profound ways. It is ironic that it is in the Spanish colonial world---recently the focus of considerable political reproach for the consequences of Columbus’s voyages---that the combined efforts of archaeology and history are revealing, if not a colonial melting pot, then at least a genuine early American "ethnic stew."

Kathleen Deagan, Colonial transformation: Euro-American cultural genesis in the early Spanish-American colonies. Journal of Anthropological Research 52(2):154. 1996