thoughts from spring break '09: race discourse

back from my last ever undergraduate spring break trip! was visiting my younger sister z, who is currently living in san juan, puerto rico.
thinking about: conceptions/constructions of RACE (who knew?) in places other than the continental united states of a...
i think that puerto rico would be an interesting case study in professor eudell's "race discourse in the americas" syllabus, which included non-US societies of cuba, the dominican republic, and... venezuela, perhaps? though maybe the wishy-washy status of puerto rico as a freely associated commonwealth aka colony of the united states would muddy its eligibility as a non-US example. if you ask me, it'd just make it that much more interesting/complex... (though really, what's not complex?) looking at a semi-shared, semi-not shared cultural/political history with the continental USA.
the/a point being: our constructions of race as a society inform how our society functions in relation to people's exterior skin tones, despite the fact that the amount of our genetic makeup as humans which accounts for said skin tones is surprisingly and astonishingly TINY--and yet, not surprisingly, because those societal ideas of race are based off of so many non-truths (that some people are inferior to others, or less human, based on thier skin tones), different societies have different ideas of race... and maybe there's hope in that.