Reading I NEED HELP ON MY HOMEWORK

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 0 . D u k e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/14/2022 4:29 PM via AN: 600444 ; Flores, Juan, Jimenez Roman, Miriam.; The Afro-Latin@ Reader : History and Culture in the United States Account: s3351633

!e Afro-Latin" Reader

A John Hope Franklin Center Book

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!e Afro-Latin" Reader !"#$%&' ()* +,-$,&. ") $!. ,)"$.* #$($.#

Edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores *,/. ,)"0.&#"$' 1&.## *,&!(2 ()* -%)*%) 2010

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© 2010 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States o# America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Jennifer Hill. Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library o# Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page o# this book.

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Introduction

Afro-Latin"? What’s an Afro-Latin"? Who is an Afro-Latin"? !e term be- fuddles us because we are accustomed to thinking o# “Afro” and “Latin"” as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin". !e short answer is that Afro-Latin"s belong to both groups. !ey are people o# African descent in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and by extension those o# African descent in the United States whose origins are in Latin America and the Caribbean. As straightforward as this de%nition would seem, the reality is that the term is not universally accepted and there is no consensus about what it means. !e di&culties surrounding what we call ourselves re'ect the complex histories o# Africans and their descendants in the Americas. And this brings us to the long answer. Broadly speaking, the word “Afro-Latin"” can be viewed as an expression o# long-term transnational relations and o# the world events that generated and were in turn a(ected by particular global social movements. Going back to the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Pan-Africanism signaled for the %rst time an explicit, organized identi%cation with Africa and African descendants and more expansively o# non-White peoples at a global level. Attendant to this process, concepts o# Negritude and cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance and Afrocubanismo gained increasing ground during the 1920s and 1930s. !e period from around mid-century and through the 1980s saw the growth o# African liberation movements as part o# a global decolonization process, as well as the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States. In Latin America the beginnings o# anti-racist organiza- tions and the Congresos o# the late 1970s introduced the %rst continental

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context for an assertive self-identi%cation by people o# African descent and a clearly articulated condemnation o# anti-Black racism. Similar de- velopments were occurring in the United States during those years, with increasing talk o# “people o# color” and the move from the terms “Negro” and “Colored” to Black to Afro-American or African American. With the explosive demographic increase o# immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, the notion o# a Hispanic or Latin" pan-ethnic identity was also gaining a foothold in the same period. As o# the 1980s, spurred by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, there has been a growing interest in the realities o# racism on a global scale and the centrality o# Africa for an understanding o# this pressing political phenomenon. !e concept o# an African diaspora, while implicit for decades in this long historical trajectory, comes to the fore during these years and serves as the guiding paradigm in our times. Most importantly for our purposes it acknowledges the historical and continuing linkages among the estimated 180 million people o# African descent in the Ameri- cas. Along with the terms “Negro,” “afrodescendiente,” and “afrolatino- americano,” the name Afro-Latin" has served to identify the constituency o# the many vibrant anti-racist movements and causes that have been gain- ing momentum throughout the hemisphere for over a generation and that attained international currency at the World Conference against Racism: Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, which was convened by )*+,-. in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. !e term “Afro-Latin"” thus was born and reared in this transnational crucible o# struggle and self-a&rmation, and until recent years it has pri- marily been used to refer to people o# African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole, even as nation- and region-speci%c termi- nology continues to hold sway. For example, depending on context a Black woman in Ecuador can identify as afrolatina, afrodescendiente, afroecua- toriana, or choteña. Since the early 1990s, however, in part as a result o# the intellectual cross-fertilization between north and south, the term has gained increasing currency in the United States. Just as in Latin America, where the pre%x Afro has been critical in challenging the homogenizing e(ects o# national and regional constructs, so in the United States the term “Afro-Latin"” has surfaced as a way to signal racial, cultural, and socioeconomic contradictions within the overly vague idea o# “Latin".” In addition to reinforcing those ever-active transnational ties, the Afro- Latin" concept calls attention to the anti-Black racism within the Latin" communities themselves. In the case o# more recent immigrants these

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Introduction 3

attitudes are brought over as ideological baggage from the home coun- tries, while for the generations-long citizens o# the United States they re- 'ect the historical location o# Blackness at the bottom o# the racial hier- archy and the Latin" propensity to uphold mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) as an exceptionalist and wishful panacea. It is also a standing challenge to the African American and English-language monopoly over Blackness in the U.S. context, with obvious implications at a hemispheric level. !roughout the hemisphere, “afro” serves to link struggles and de- clare a community o# experiences and interests. Most signi%cantly, the pre%x establishes the foundational historical and cultural connection to Africa, an a&rmation that simultaneously de%es the Eurocentric ideolo- gies that have characterized Latin America and the Caribbean. !us, while we recognize the primacy and historical priority o# the hemispheric usage o# the term, in this volume our focus is on the strate- gically important but still largely understudied United States context o# Afro-Latin" experience. What then does Afro-Latin" mean in that con- text? What are and who are United States Afro-Latin"s? Clearly the reference is to those whose numbers and historical tra- jectory have had the greatest signi%cance in the United States. While recognizing the inextricable connections to the transnational movement or identity %eld (“ethno-scape”) o# the same name, there are conditions and meanings that are speci%c to the national framework o# history and society in the United States. In some cases, transnational and domestic experiences may even run askew o# each other and show greater discon- tinuity than parallels. !us, for example, despite the crucial place o# Bra- zil—the country with a Black population second in size only to that o# Nigeria—within the Latin American context, the Brazilian presence in the United States has been relatively small and the Afro-Brazilian negligible. Similarly, despite the towering signi%cance o# the Haitian Revolution to hemispheric history and the parallels that can be drawn among all immi- grant peoples o# African descent, in the context o# the United States Hai- tians have consistently been distinguished—and have often distinguished themselves—from Latin"s. Unlike the case o# Afro-Latin"s, Haitians are generally understood to be unambiguously Black. We have identi%ed four primary “coordinates” to a deeper and more 'exible understanding o# that speci%c reality: group history, transnational discourse, relations between African Americans and Latin"s, and the spe- ci%c lived experience o# being Afro-Latin". !e following sections con- sider each o# these coordinates in greater depth.

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Group History

First and most obviously Afro-Latin" refers to those Latin"s o# visible or self-proclaimed African descent. It is a group designation, the name for a community that historically has not tended to call itself, or to have been called, in that way; preferred terms have tended to emphasize national ori- gin or ethnicity rather than racial identi%cation. But Afro-Latin"s increas- ingly identify as such in recent years, and their group past demonstrates a sense o# tradition and shared social and cultural realities. We now can speak o# an Afro-Latin" history and trace the trajectory o# a collective ex- perience through the entire span o# the history o# the United States. We have taken this historical sequence as the main structuring prin- ciple o# this book. !ough its parts are also de%ned by a range o# themes such as music, gender, and public representation, they proceed through the centuries and decades o# Black Latin" social and cultural experience and arrive at the present. Since the time o# the European conquest and early United States colonial history, and through the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries, Blacks o# Spanish-language backgrounds have built up a legacy o# shared and distinctive cultural values and expression that has traversed national particularities and di(erentiated itsel# from the group history o# both African Americans and other Latin"s. And in the treacher- ous counterposition o# African Americans and Latin"s that characterizes the racial discourse in this country today, Afro-Latin"s as individuals and as a group constitute a potential bridge across that ominous ethno-racial divide. As the %rst readings show, the earliest manifestations o# Afro-Latin" presence actually predate the very founding o# the country and even the %rst English settlements. As re'ected in Peter Wood’s title o# the open- ing reading, the “earliest Africans in North America” were in fact Afro- Latin"s. !eir role in the settlement o# St. Augustine in 1565 and in the Castillo de San Marcos and the Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose) places them at the threshold o# the nation’s history. Or perhaps, given the foundational symbolism o# Jamestown and Plymouth, those ini- tial Afro-Latin" experiences in Spanish Florida are more the antechamber o# that history, the less ceremonious advance contact between European invaders and indigenous peoples. As bu(ers and cannon fodder, as re- connaissance scouts and militiamen, as intermediaries, and o# course as attendants and slaves, Afro-Latin"s have been implicated in the forging o# the North American story, complicitous with and at the same time them- selves subject victims o# its inhuman excesses. Afro-Latin" culture thus

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Introduction 5

not only enriches but also points to the limits and exclusions o# the hege- monic Anglo-American culture and its history. !e %rst Afro-Latin" historical personage, immortalized in the memo- rable Relación o# Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was the famed Estevanico el Negro. Along with the chronicler Cabeza de Vaca himself, he was one o# the four survivors o# the ill-starred voyage o# Pán%lo de Narváez along the Florida coast in 1528. After years-long captivity among the Indian tribes o# Florida, Estevanico joined Cabeza de Vaca on the long trek across the continent, traversing what is now Texas and northern Mexico. But Este- vanico’s unique historical role actually occurs in the years following those recounted by Cabeza de Vaca, which saw him joining the 1539 expedition o# Fray Marcos de Niza to the legendary city o# Cíbola (New Mexico) and providing indispensable reconnoitering and intermediary services to the campaign. And there are the unnamed Blacks whose presence marked the early history o# this land long before the United States declared its own name and identity, including people like the mulata woman who in the 1540s was left behind in what is today Kansas, the countless frontier sol- diers who served the Spanish Crown and the casta families who established the %rst settlements throughout the southwest and California. !is early stage o# what is now the United States clearly reveals the social construct- edness o# race and the negotiations necessary in societies where non- White people dominated numerically but Europeans held power. Racial mixing, the object o# much current fascination and perceived by many as a new phenomenon, in fact has a long history, and as indicated by both Jack Forbes and Virginia Gould in their essays in this volume it was often the only mechanism available for improving one’s circumstances within a patriarchal, racist power structure. !ough Estevanico may appear to be an isolated and idiosyncratic in- stance o# Afro-Latin" presence in United States history, his most dis- tinctive cultural features (his Blackness and his Spanish language) and how those features %gure in the Euro-Indian-African interaction that is to shape United States history clearly anticipate those o# subsequent Afro- Latin" generations. His dilemma o# being a Black man serving as advance guard in the exploratory incursions o# the White man also remains a recur- rent one in the racial, political, and cultural relations o# the United States through to the present. While this prototypical positioning o# the Afro-Latin" %rst came into view in the sixteenth century in northern Mexico (now the American South- west), the history o# the group actually transpires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in the eastern part o# the country. Afro-Latin"s in

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the United States are preponderantly o# Hispanic Caribbean origins stem- ming in largest numbers from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Central America (especially Panama and Honduras), and the coastal areas o# Colombia and Venezuela. !e mid-nineteenth century initiates the for- mative period, witnessing both the centrality o# African American–Latin" historical relations in the war with Mexico—especially in the debates over the extension o# slavery to Mexican territories—and the beginnings o# the long-term experience o# Black Cubans in southern Florida. !e burgeoning cigar industry brought thousands o# Cubans, along with some Puerto Ricans and Spaniards, to the cities o# Tampa, Key West, and Ybor City. !e majority o# the cigar workers were Afro-Cubans, while the owners and overseers were mostly White Cubans and Spaniards. After the turn o# the century, and especially after the decline o# the cigar indus- try by 1920, that population waned signi%cantly, but between 1870 and 1940 the %rst sizable Afro-Latin" community experienced the collective triumphs and hardships o# prolonged group life in United States society. !e Key West area was felt to be an extension o# Havana, with many o# the workers moving back and forth with frequency and thereby establishing the kind o# cross-border cultural dynamism so characteristic o# later Afro- Latin" peoples in times closer to our own. As recounted in the reading by Susan Greenbaum, and as later narrated in moving personal terms in the selection from Evelio Grillo’s memoir Black Cuban, Black American, Afro-Latin"s in Florida enjoyed di(erential rela- tions with other nationalities, the most complex yet most signi%cant with White Cubans on the one hand and with African Americans on the other. Historical accounts show that while in the earlier period there existed a strong cultural and political unity among all Cubans and “Latin"s” along national and linguistic lines, their social lives were separate. !e impact o# post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow conditions escalated anti-Black racism and increased the need for Afro-Latin"s to establish ties with other “col- oreds.” Ample testimony to this unique Afro-Latin" predicament remains available in the periodical literature and organizational documents o# this historically important but largely bygone community experience. In the course o# the twentieth century the main locus o# Afro-Latin" social life shifts from Florida to New York City, and from the Cuban dias- pora to that o# the Puerto Ricans. Prior to the Spanish-American War and 1898 the two groups converged and united in their common struggle against Spanish colonialism, as represented in the Partido Revolucionario Cubano and its Puerto Rican section and the joint leadership o# %gures o# the stature o# José Martí, Eugenio María de Hostos, and Sotero Figueroa.

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Introduction 7

During this later-nineteenth-century period the famous Afro-Cuban Gen- eral Antonio Maceo took on towering symbolic importance in Cuba and the United States, a stature that resonates in the frequent occurrence o# the %rst name Maceo (usually pronounced máy-see-o) among African Americans. !ough proclamations o# racial equality were integral to the abolitionist and anticolonial rhetoric o# the movement, evidence exists o# the relegation and subordination o# its Black members, as well as the ab- sence and nonencouragement o# any distinctive Black cultural or political agenda. Some o# these Black and mulatto members o# the anticolonial movement, such as Rafael Serra, Sotero Figueroa, and Pachín Marín, have their place in the course o# Afro-Latin" history in the United States. With the United States occupation o# Cuba and Puerto Rico and the ever-growing migratory presence o# both populations in New York and other northeastern cities the central cultural concern o# Afro-Latin"s becomes their relationship with African Americans, and more generally with an African diasporic world. !is new perspective is embodied most prominently by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Black Puerto Rican who took active part in the anti-Spanish liberation struggle by serving as secretary in the highly important club Las Dos Antillas under the leadership o# José Martí. Schomburg’s Caribbean and Latino background has generally been eclipsed by his subsequent accomplishments as a seminal %gure in the Harlem Renaissance and as one o# the foremost collectors and biblio- philes o# the Africana experience, which culminated in the founding o# the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Given his immense educational contribution to knowledge about the Black world, which continued to include a special interest in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Spain, Schomburg may be considered the most illustrious and self- conscious o# all Afro-Latin"s in the United States as well as the one whose aspirations and ambiguities seem most deeply exemplary o# Afro-Latin" social experience. For this reason we devote an entire section o# the book to the life, thought, and legacy o# Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Schomburg’s life on the color line, his direct knowledge and experi- ence o# racism both in Latin America and the United States and his re- sultant a&nity with African Americans, was also paradigmatic for Afro- Latin"s through the %rst hal# o# the twentieth century. !e stories o# many Afro-Latin"s, both prominent and lesser known, tell o# this precarious situation at the racial and cultural seams o# the society. !e readings in part III, and many o# those that follow attest to the racial experience o# Afro-Cubans such as Melba Alvarado, Graciela, Minnie Miñoso, and Mario

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Bauzá, along with Afro-Puerto Ricans such as Rafael Hernández, Jesús Colón, and Piri !omas, and the varied ways in which they navigated the color line. Ironically, for many Afro-Latin"s the overt nature o# Jim Crow in the United States would actually prove to be liberatory, a refreshing change from the hypocritical rhetoric o# Latin American and Caribbean racial democracy. Since the early decades o# the twentieth century the world o# popular music has been a rich %eld o# Afro-Latin" experience, as illustrated in the selections in part /0. James Reese Europe’s recruitment o# the legendary Afro-Puerto Rican composer and bandleader Rafael Hernández and many other Black Boricuas into the Hell%ghters Regiment Band during World War I was an event o# great moment in United States Afro-Latin" his- tory, as was the collaboration o# the Afro-Cuban innovator Mario Bauzá and Dizzy Gillespie in the forging o# Afro-Cuban jazz or Cubop in the late 1940s. !e special place o# the pioneering work o# Arsenio Rodrí- guez as analyzed in the selection by David García also warrants attention in the story o# New York’s Latin music as it leads up to the salsa boom o# the 1970s. !e complexities o# the social experiences o# these musi- cal greats and their audiences, and the revolutionary changes brought to both jazz and Cuban music history, stand as a testament to Afro-Latin" creativity and cultural resilience. By mid-century Puerto Ricans were already outnumbering Cubans as the largest Latin" group in New York City, and as such they were becoming the primary representatives o# the Afro-Latin" experience. !e predominantly White composition o# Cuban migration after the 1959 revolution contrib- uted further to this demographic change. While light-skinned Cubans re- mained the archetype, and the stereotype, o# Afro-Latin" culture in the increasingly pervasive United States mass media, it was Puerto Ricans who made up the most sizable and vocal community o# Afro-Latin"s. !e 1960s saw an outburst o# political, literary, and cultural expression that gave voice and perspective to the particular position o# young people who are both Puerto Rican and Black. To illustrate that it was not only Puerto Ricans who a&rmed a militant Black nationalist position in those years we include a short reading by the Afro-Dominican Carlos Cooks. Because his activism dates back to the 1940s, Cooks is sometimes viewed as a link between the in'uential earlier presence o# Marcus Garvey and that o# Malcolm X in the 1960s. Cooks’s condemnation o# “hair-conking” and his exaltation o# Black female beauty and pitch for Black economic self- advancement provided continuity with some o# Garvey’s ideas but also anticipated themes raised in Black writings o# more recent years.

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Introduction 9

!e ascendancy o# the Young Lords Party in the late 1960s attests to the participation o# Latin"s in the African American Civil Rights and Black Power movements and to the %rst generalized a&rmation o# Blackness among young Puerto Ricans born in the United States. !e Young Lords leader Pablo Guzmán, generally known as “Yoruba,” pointed clearly to the racism within the Latin" community as an obstacle to the struggle for justice, and at the historical need for unity with African Americans. His present-day re'ection written expressly for this collection, along with his statement as a Young Lord, mark still another landmark in United States Afro-Latin" history. In addition to the Young Lords experience, contribu- tions by Marta Moreno Vega and Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso illustrate well the transnational dimensions o# this period o# intense assertion o# African diasporic connections, while Luis Barrios’s re'ection on Pentecostalism reminds us that cultural continuities can be found in unexpected spaces. Most notable among the literary works o# this transformative period is the autobiographical novel Down !ese Mean Streets (1967) by the young Black Puerto Rican–Cuban author Piri !omas. In this work we %nd in sharp dramatic terms nothing short o# a psychological anatomy o# the Black Latin" paradox and the tortuous struggle to a&rm both identities in the presumably polarized Black-White United States racial formation. In a similar vein the so-called Nuyorican poets o# the 1970s such as Pedro Pietri, Sandra María Esteves, Felipe Luciano, and Victor Hernández Cruz incor- porate a strong sense o# Black cultural identity in their proclamations o# a United States–based Puerto Rican reality. Collaborations between these poets and such primarily African American ensembles as !e Last Poets and the !ird World Revelationists attest to the strong cultural bonds felt by Afro-Latin"s with their African American contemporaries. More re- cent poets such as Tato Laviera, Louis Reyes Rivera, Willie Perdomo, and Mariposa (María Teresa Fernández) deepen these cross-cultural insights even further; their poems ring with the contemporary signi%cance o# the Afro-Latin" experience. We include these and other Afro-Latin" poems in various parts o# the book as illustrative o# this rich cultural interaction. !e period o# the 1970s was also characterized by a growing aware- ness o# and attention to women’s experiences and the centrality o# issues o# gender and sexuality. While we include a range o# texts by and about Afro-Latinas throughout the collection, we devote part VI, “Afro-Latinas” speci%cally to analysis and testimony concerning heterosexual and queer experience among Afro-Latin"s. Angela Jorge’s dissection o# the multiple oppressions endured by Black Puerto Rican women, which dates back to the 1970s, is now a classic. Two other essays, by Marta Cruz-Janzen and

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Ana Lara, are more recent and provide powerful critical re'ections on the gender and sexual experience o# Afro-Latinas, while Mariposa’s poem on the agonies o# hair straightening addresses this experience in a more direct, personal way. !e subsequent and most recent generation, which spans the period since the later 1970s, saw a waning o# the 1960s level o# political and cultural e(ervescence coupled with a demographic explosion o# Latin" populations and the ascendancy o# the idea o# Latinidad as a %eld o# group identity. Both developments had the e(ect o# pitting the nation’s “fastest- growing minority” directly against the African American community in a race for numerical supremacy and resources. While the post–Civil Rights era brought a widespread re'ection on race and Blackness among African Americans, especially because o# the rapid rise in Black immigration from the Caribbean and Africa, Latin" identity came to be increasingly de%ned as non-Black, and in some ways anti-Black. !e inadequacy o# the Latin" concept along with the need to broaden and complicate the notion o# Blackness in the United States has given rise to the understanding that Latinidad and Blackness are not mutually exclu- sive and to a recognition o# their interface in the Afro-Latin" presence. !e term “Afro-Latin"” as applied to people in the United States emerged in the early 1990s when it became clear that race matters in the Latin" community, and that these racial realities make it a grave distortion to think o# Latin"s as a monolithic group. Sociological and economic analy- sis as exempli%ed by the work o# John Logan and o# William Darity, Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton included in this collection, established the discrepancies within the Latin" community according to all indica- tors, not to mention the racial discrimination against Black Latin"s by the wider society as well as by other Latin"s. Tanya Hernandez’s discussion o# legal attempts to prove discrimination at the workplace exposes some o# the di&culties faced by Afro-Latin"s when race is refracted through the lens o# national origin. Logan’s analysis and others even suggest that by way o# social experience Black Latin"s have more in common with African Americans than with the remainder o# the Latin" community. !e emerging acknowledgment o# the distinctiveness o# Black Latin"s within the multiracial Latin" aggregate has not been matched by their visible presence in public and media representations o# that experience. On the contrary, as is evident in the readings comprising part VII, Afro- Latin"s have faced virtually total invisibility and erasure as a possible com- ponent o# either the Latin" or the Black population: as far as the main- stream media are concerned, Latin"s are not black and Blacks are not

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Introduction 11

Latin". And on the rare occasions when Afro-Latin"s do %nd their way into media or other public forms o# representation (such as the Anacostia Museum’s “Black Mosaic” exhibit analyzed by Ginetta Candelario in her essay), the distortions, misunderstandings, and negative stereotypes have been rampant. While this disconnect between group experience and pub- lic representation goes back generations, and certainly colored the experi- ences o# Afro-Latin"s such as Minnie Miñoso in Major League Baseball and Juano Hernández, Eusebia Cosme, and Lucecita Benítez in the enter- tainment world, critical and scholarly attention to the phenomenon only came into its own in the present generation. While Carlos Flores’s re'ec- tion denounces the absence o# Blacks in Latino media, the essay by Ejima Baker and the one by Alan Hughes and Milca Esdaille for Black Enterprise suggest a greater receptivity (albeit still problematic) to Afro-Latin"s and a sensitivity to their potential role as a bridge across communities. Finally, in more recent times the cultural tenor that has accompanied the rise o# Afro-Latin"s as a group reality and designation has been set by hip hop. Since its inception, as described by Raquel Rivera and Pancho McFar- land, the hip hop “zone” has been one o# Afro-Latin" cultural expression, with its main exponents and stylistic forms issuing from the collaborative creativity o# African Americans and Caribbean Latin"s. Centering on the Afro-Latin" dilemma David Lamb’s novel, signi%cantly titled Do Plátanos Go wit’ Collard Greens, Latin" is obviously conceived in the framework o# hip-hop expressivity, and the audiences attending the theatrical version o# the book are strongly Afro-Latin" in ethnic composition. !e most wildly popular musical style in the new millennium, reggaeton, which is well described in the essay by Wayne Marshall, is clearly a sequel to rap and is still within the hip hop zone. And yet with its Spanish-language lyrics and meshing o# diverse Caribbean styles it appears to be even more pro- nouncedly Afro-Latin" rather than African American with a Latin"/Carib- bean admixture.

Transnational Discourse

While the term “Afro-Latin"s” is o# recent vintage and only gains cur- rency in our own times, the experience reaches far back in United States history and has passed through many di(erent stages and periods in the course o# generations. In addition to its deep historical foundations, an understanding o# the Afro-Latin" experience must be guided by a clear appreciation o# the transnational discourse or identity %eld linking Black Latin Americans and Latin"s across national and regional lines. Indeed,

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that hemispheric link begins with the very reason for the presence o# Afro- Latin"s in North America, which is the direct result o# the selective migra- tion from the countries o# origin to the United States. As a general rule, migratory movements o# poor and working-class people tend to have a larger proportion o# African-descendant migrants, with the Puerto Rican, Dominican, and pre-revolutionary Cuban migrations providing clear evi- dence o# this correlation. Furthermore, no stage in Afro-Latin" history in the United States is without some reference to home countries, whether it be personal or group memories, familial ties, or current political or social situations. !is is also the case with all, or nearly so, o# the readings in this collec- tion. In some cases, such as the testimonies o# Yvette Modestin, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, and Silvio Torres-Saillant, those ties are especially ex- plicit and vital. Histories and events in Panama, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other homelands are ever present in the lives o# Afro-Latin"s in the United States, as are the ongoing e(ects o# racial ideologies and experiences that prevail in those places o# per- sonal or family origin. As with the Latin" concept itself, as well as the African American, it is increasingly important to resist the limitation o# Afro-Latin" to its national United States con%nes. !at vital transnational relationship is itsel# an eminently Afro-Latin" phenomenon.

Cross-Cultural Relations

Caution should be exercised when assessing the transnational dimensions o# the concept o# Afro-Latin", for while it does break us out o# a strictly United States–centered perspective we also run the risk o# romanticized thinking about those cultural homelands or newly discovered fonts o# African-based practices. One potential saving grace is that the growing and vibrant afrodescendiente movements within Latin America and the Caribbean are unmasking the inherent racism o# these exoticized and folklorized versions o# Black experience. What is perhaps most particular to the United States context is that here the Afro-Latin" problematic, or lo afrolatino, has to do with the cross- cultural relation between the Afro and the Latin", which means most saliently the relation between Latin"s and African Americans. !us while the concept refers %rst o# all to the group experience o# Black Latin"s themselves, the broader interaction between the two “largest minorities,” including non-Afro Latin"s and non-Latin" Blacks, bears directly on that population that is both, and conditions its social experience at every stage.

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Introduction 13

We have seen that as early as the colonial period in “Spanish Florida,” the Southwest, and Louisiana, and throughout the story o# Afro-Latin"s in the nineteenth century and the twentieth, Afro-Latin"s have often lived and worked alongside African Americans in a long and complex relation- ship characterized by both distance and embrace. For many Afro-Latin"s, such as Evelio Grillo and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, identifying with and becoming part o# the African American community turned out to be their most ready access to society in the United States, as well as their most evident recourse in the face o# racist rejection by other Latin"s. While the broader relation between Latin"s and African Americans is clearly central to an understanding o# Afro-Latin" life in the United States, it is important not to limit the concept o# Afro-Latin" to that connection and to recognize clearly the presence o# a group that embodies both at once. Frequently the Afro-Latin" idea is taken to refer to the alliance or historical symbiosis between two groups that are basically dissimilar and unrelated. A corollary and also a very common assumption is that an Afro- Latin" is the o(spring o# intermarriage between a Latina or Latino and an African American. O# course, this cross-cultural experience is very wide- spread and may be o# constitutive importance for many, as it is for María Rosario Jackson in this collection. But limiting attention to that aspect can often mean overlooking the existence o# a population whose very cultural heritage is both African and Latin American in an organic way. Such is the case in our time o# the afromestizo immigrants from Mexico’s Paci%c Coast who are creating community in California and the Carolinas, the latter o# which is documented in this volume in an essay on the Winston-Salem area. With all due caution the relative unity and solidarity between the Latin" and African American communities is no doubt the principal %eld o# action and interaction for the Afro-Latin" in the United States. !e build- ing o# a common agenda, and the potential mediating role o# Afro-Latin"s as a living embodiment o# that unity, has received growing emphasis in recent times, and it is the focal point for the political re'ections o# com- mentators like Mark Sawyer, James Jennings, and others in this volume. !e gravitation o# many Latin"s, including Afro-Latin"s, toward White- ness and their attendant distance from and disdain for African American Blackness has been well documented, as is clear in the articles by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Ed Morales, William Darity, Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton, and others. !e very presence o# Latin"s o# visible African de- scent is the most signi%cant countervailing pressure against this divisive and self-demeaning tendency, especially as Afro-Latin"s themselves come

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to acknowledge and a&rm their full Afro-diasporic identity. Here again the transnational dimension plays a vital role as Afro-Latin"s throughout the hemisphere reach across national borders to share experiences, griev- ances, tactics, and resources in a growing Black-consciousness movement. But the general recognition o# the diversities within both the Latin" and the African American communities, and the subjection o# Black Latin"s to racial and cultural discrimination even among their own, is incumbent on the entire public across racial and cultural lines.

The Fact o8 Afro-Latinidad

Finally, Afro-Latin" also means the distinctive and unique phenomeno- logical experience lived at a personal level by people who are both Black and Latin" in all aspects o# their social life. Aside from and lending human concreteness to the larger historical and structural dimensions outlined above, the way that Afro-Latin"s navigate their social identities as they intersect with other Latin"s and with other Blacks is unique to them. !e “fact o# Afro-Latinidad” (to borrow Frantz Fanon’s phrase “the fact o# blackness”) makes that experience distinct in basic ways from that o# either non-Black Latin"s or non-Latin" Blacks. Indeed, in a paradigmatic way this othered Blackness is common to all foreign Blacks in the United States, including Africans, Haitians, and other peoples o# non-Spanish backgrounds. !ese demarcations take on salient dramatic life in many o# the selec- tions included in this book, most notably perhaps in the work by Piri !omas, in the analysis by Jairo Moreno o# the relation between Dizzy Gillespie and Mario Bauzá, and in the poems o# Willie Perdomo and Tato Laviera. Because o# the central importance o# this experiential aspect o# being Afro-Latin" we have devoted an entire section o# the book, part IX, to the personal testimonies o# a range o# present-day United States Afro- Latin"s from di(erent national backgrounds and walks o# life. As these life stories and countless others make clear, Afro-Latin" is at the personal level a unique and distinctive experience and identity be- cause o# its range among and between Latin", Black, and United States American dimensions o# lived social reality. In their quest for a full and appropriate sense o# social identity Afro-Latin"s are thus typically pulled in three directions at once and share a complex, multidimensional optic on contemporary society. Taking a cue from W. E. B. Du Bois, we might name this three-pronged web o# a&liations “triple-consciousness.” To paraphrase those unforgettable lines from !e Souls o" Black Folk (1903),

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Introduction 15

in studying the historical and contemporary experience o# the United States Afro-Latin", one ever feels his three-ness,—a Latin", a Negro, an American; three souls, three thoughts, three unreconciled strivings; three warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. Du Bois’s reference to strength and resilience bears emphasis: the multiple experiences and perspectives—including the contradictions, pain, and outrage—does not necessarily translate into pathological confusion. As many o# the contributions to this volume sug- gest, embracing and celebrating all the dimensions o# one’s sel# has not only been possible but has also resulted in signi%cant innovations at the personal and collective level. It is an example o# how what doesn’t kill you makes you strong. To be clear, the use o# the catchy term “triple-consciousness” is not in- tended to trump or one-up the African American particularity and struggle but rather only to point to the increased complexities o# the “color line” in light o# the transnational nature o# present-day social experience. For when in !e Souls o" Black Folk Du Bois so momentously declared the problem o# the twentieth century to be the color line, he was not speaking strictly o# African Americans but o# “the relation o# the darker to the lighter races o# men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands o# the sea.” He recog- nized over a hundred years ago that these crucial social di(erentiations were not national but global in scope. What is new in our new century is not that transnational reach o# Black experience but rather the degree to which the global and the national are intertwined with one another, and the immense political and cultural implications o# this dramatic shift. !e experience o# Afro-Latin"s in the United States and the emergent realities o# the new century impel us, in tune with Du Bois’s critical legacy, to further advance an integral global vision o# race, and at the same time to articulate a keener awareness o# speci%cities and internal complexities, both within each group and across the ampli%ed range o# groups. Here again, Du Bois’s choice o# language is o# key interest, for in !e Souls o" Black Folk we have the crucial linkage o# a class dimension with the heralding o# cultural awakening among the oppressed nations and peoples; the word “folk,” which harbors both a class and a racial reference, holds the key to comprehending the new Black and Latin" diversity and to hailing our elusive yet persistent goal, the “dawn o# freedom.”

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