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Afro-Latinas/os and the Racial Wall

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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Afro-Latinas/os and the Racial Wall

Silvio Torres-Saillant

Situating Afro-Latinas/os

Afro-Latinas/os occupy a peculiar spot in this country’s ethnoracial bandwagon insofar as the label that names them combines blackness (Afro), as a racial designa- tion that stretches across numerous ethnicities, and Hispanicity (Latina/o), as an ethnic category that encompasses multiple races. Conceivably, an Afro-Latina/o may come from two black parents of Latin American origin, a black and a non- black Latin American parent, a black non-Hispanic Caribbean parent and a Hispanic parent of any race, a US Hispanic of any race and a black African, as well as an African American and a US Hispanic of any race, among other variations of mixed parentages. The variegated nature of the assorted ancestry of Afro-Latinas/os comes to further expose the precarious constitution of the official classification that breaks the US population down into five presumably distinct communities of descent. Since 1977 the US Census has acknowledged one ethnic and four racial branches to catalogue the country’s population. The category of Hispanic or Latina/o, consisting of people who, regardless of race, trace their origins to the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas, constitute the one ethnicity. Then follow the four groupings that make up the races. American Indian or Alaska Native describes an individual ancestrally connected to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Asian or Pacific Islander refers to a person with origins traceable to the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including such countries as China, Pakistan, and the Philippines, as well as to Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands. Black or African American applies to a person who descends from any of the black racial groups of Africa. Finally, White denotes a person of European, North African, or Middle Eastern origins.

The unstable nature of the classification system currently in place was borne out by the voices that contested it during the 1990s, as policymakers and activists, venting their dissatisfaction with its logic, contemplated the possibility of modifying

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Flores, Juan, and Renato Rosaldo. A Companion to Latina/o Studies, edited by Juan Flores, and Renato Rosaldo, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uiowa/detail.action?docID=320058. Created from uiowa on 2017-03-27 14:39:22.

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it prior to the 2000 Census. A national coalition of Asian Pacific Americans lobbied for the inclusion of Cambodia and Lao under the heading of Asian or Pacific Islander. The Arab American Institute argued for the removal of Middle Easterners from the White category and their placement in a protected category of their own. Hawaiian Senator Daniel K. Akaka advocated the transfer of his people from the Asian or Pacific Islander to the American Indian or Alaska Native box to protect them from the misperception that they, the original inhab- itants of the Hawaiian Islands, “somehow ‘immigrated’ to the United States like other Asian or Pacific Island groups.” The National Council of La Raza wished for Hispanics to gain recognition as a full-fledged race rather than merely as an ethnic group (Wright 1994: 2). Still other voices militated in favor of creating a new category for people of multiracial origin. The proponents of a multiracial box did not succeed in getting the new category added to the existing ethnoracial classification system, but the fact that, for the first time ever, the 2000 US Census form allowed people to mark one or more racial groups may be regarded as a small victory on their part. Political scientist Kim Williams’ forthcoming book Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America examines the long-term implications of the change even though “only about 2.6 percent of Americans identified with more than one race in 2000” (Williams 2005: 3).

However, I do not see the epistemologically ludicrous configuration of the existing ethnoracial taxonomy as justifiable ground for recommending its out- right dismissal. Such dismissal, in my view, would entail a reckless disregard for the civil rights agenda that the population headcount came into existence to address. Besides, epistemological dissatisfaction with the existing categories may be prompted by the equally disturbing expectation that some other classification system will achieve an accurate and precise account of the population’s ethnoracial formation. I have made my peace with the labels that classify the US population into distinct communities of descent by accepting them as expressive of a set of sociopolitical aspirations rather than as descriptive of an objective reality. The US Hispanic population, for instance, can undertake to reap whatever practical benefits the Census categories may bring in terms of allocation of federal funds to particular municipalities or school districts without allowing the strictly stat- istical nomenclature of a federal agency to shape the way the “community” looks at itself. Nothing prevents a leadership that promotes a Latina/o agenda from owning to the unstable and fractious nature of the very concept of Latina/o as an appellation with the ambition to denote the quiddity or core of the collective being of 35 million US Hispanics with histories, heritages, and national traumas of disparate sorts. By virtue of their interlaced ethnoracial and multicultural experience dating back to their colonial roots in the Americas, Latinas/os have the historical wherewithal to discern the fragility of ethnoracial identity formula- tions and help shake the conceptual edifices of the racial imagination. They can trouble the dominant racial logic, first, by stressing the US Hispanic population’s own multiracial constitution. Foregrounding “the differentiated experiences of White Latinas/os, Indian Latinas/os, Asian Latinas/os, and Afro-Latinas/os,”

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they can contribute to an expansion of the identity terrain currently available to the population, thus trespassing the territorial boundaries of what David Hollinger has termed “the ethnoracial pentagon” (Torres-Saillant 2002: 452). The system- atic fracturing of the Latina/o or Hispanic label may have several salutary con- sequences. A refashioning of the group’s identity space could rid it of the “white supremacist assumptions” that often inform intra-Latina/o relations, potentially increasing the likelihood that the most commonly marginalized subsections of the US Hispanic population will identify with national efforts to mobilize the whole “community” around agendas of collective significance (Torres-Saillant 2003: 147).

Afro-Latinas/os, I would propose, have an even more central role to play in advancing this aspiration. Having borne the brunt of negrophobic practices and discourses in American society as well as in their ancestral Latin American home- lands, Afro-Latinas/os may boast of a sharpened outlook. Those Afro-Latinas/os who have been enlightened rather than destroyed by their pan-hemispheric marginalization can muster the necessary wisdom to successfully deploy their deeper understanding of the travesty of racial thought and challenge intra- Latina/o prejudices, foster collaboration with African Americans, and effectively participate in the struggle for social justice, equality, and inclusion on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Seldom experiencing their race as natural, Afro-Latinas/os often feel called upon to define themselves according to one or another of the components of their complexity. Growing up in East Harlem, Roberto Santiago often heard from the African American boys on the block that he did not “act black,” while his lighter-skinned Puerto Rican friends categorically whined “You’re not black. You’re a boricua, you ain’t no Moreno” (Santiago 1994: 46). The prevalent instinct of hypodescent racialization, which would favor blackness as the com- ponent that names the person, does not seem to apply unproblematically to Afro-Latinas/os. Evincing the hemispheric dimension of the phenomenon, Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler stress the importance of focusing on the specificity of the life experience of “both Afro-Latin Americans and US-born and/or raised Afro-Latinas/os” since, while “the stigma of blackness” may operate similarly throughout the hemisphere, the various national origin groups (Afro-Colombians, Afro-Puerto Ricans, Afro-Ecuadoreans, US-based Afro-Dominicans, etc.) experi- ence it heterogeneously (Dzidzienyo and Oboler 2005: 16).

The Garifuna of Honduras are among the least “Latinized” and most cultur- ally distinct Afro-Latin American populations. In the United States, however, their insertion into the country’s ethnoracial structure does not occur without ambivalence. Generally, they very clearly assert their blackness, but they also tend to differentiate themselves from African Americans and for the most part settle for an “Afro-Hispanic” identity space (Anderson 2005: 112–13). Afro- Latinas/os also enter the US Hispanic sphere with a measure of disadvantage. For instance, they show weaker socioeconomic indicators than other Latinas/os according to a study done by the Mumford Center at SUNY Albany, and the

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2002 National Survey of Latinas/os conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, DC, interviewed many Afro-Latinas/os who reported suffering discrimination from other Latinas/os (Hernandez 2005: 36). We do not know the size of the Afro-Latina/o population. The 2000 US Census counted over 35 million people of Hispanic descent in the country, making up 12.5 percent of the total population. Since the Census form for the first time gave individuals the option of marking more than one race category, some 2 percent of those who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latina/o also marked “Black,” whereas nearly half marked “White” and 45.2 percent marked “some other race” (Hernandez 2005: 35). Conceivably, the number of Afro-Latinas/os will grow substantially as individuals become more comfortable with the new Census practice of marking more than one ethnoracial category, but it seems that the majority of those who marked “Black” and “Latina/o” trace their origin to the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, with a contingent of approximately 250,000 individuals of Mexican ancestry also classifying themselves as “Black” (35).

The Advent of Brown

The numerical growth of US Hispanics has elicited the concerns of doomsayers as much as it has emboldened the prophets of a better day. On the neutral side, scholars “agree that a ‘browning’ phenomenon is now more prominent than ever” in major American cities that boast a meaningful portion of non-white residents (Rios and Mohamed 2003: xi). Among the prognosticators of calamity, Harvard University polemicist Samuel P. Huntington awakened his dormant prominence as a public voice by seeking to alarm white and black Americans with such forebodings as this: “One index foretells the future: In 1998 ‘José’ replaced ‘Michael’ as the most popular name for newborn boys in both California and Texas” (Huntington 2004: 44). Linguist Otto Santa Ana has meticulously exam- ined the metaphors prevailing in American public discourse to evoke the “dan- gerous” growth of the Hispanic population, many of which codified the language that went into the drafting of Proposition 187, the law passed by the California electorate on November 8, 1994 to deny healthcare, social services, and educa- tion to undocumented aliens. Depicting the country at the verge of drowning, “awash under a brown tide,” with a “relentless flow” of immigrants who, “like waves on a beach,” threatened to remake “the face of America,” the metaphors compellingly appealed to the citizenry’s fear of browning (Santa Ana 2002: 7).

Apparently fearful of the inundation that a brown tide would bring, the City of Manassas, Virginia, a mere 35 miles from Washington, DC, recently put in place a new zoning ordinance that outlaws “households consisting of a family’s cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, and nephews,” much to the indignation of the Washington Post, whose December 30, 2005 editorial articulated a sobering reprim- and of the regulation. “Like other suburban localities in the region,” the editorial notes, “Manassas is undergoing a demographic shift as Hispanic immigrants,

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legal and undocumented, move into what were once relatively homogenous neighborhoods,” where they often “share housing with their relatives to help out with the rent or mortgage.” While some communities have welcomed this influx, Manassas city officials have opted “to harass” the immigrants, “sending inspectors into selected city households to interrogate hardworking people about the numbers and relationships of the inhabitants.” The editorial mentions the case of Leyla and Juan Chávez, US citizens living in this country since the 1980s who, found guilty of housing a “nephew as well as a renter couple who lived down- stairs,” endured “the city’s persecution” and ultimately decided “to leave the area.” Evidently the management at the Washington Post, though predominantly white, one would suppose, does not share the anxiety of the Manassas city officials about a potential darkening of the hue of the population. Similarly, there are those, mostly coming from Hispanic quarters, who herald the demographic change in an unabashedly celebratory tone. Medical scholar David E. Hayes- Bautista confidently asserts that by virtue of their numerical growth “Latinas/os today are defining what it is to be American” (Hayes-Bautista 2004: 176). Trac- ing the historical development of Hispanics in California and chronicling the uninterrupted presence of a Latina/o civil society in the state dating back to April 1769, this Mexican American academic regards Latinas/os as “the new generation of Americans who will create American society and identity for the twenty-first century,” and he seeks to allay the concerns of those who perceive the demographic shift as corrosive of the country’s core values by suggesting that, far from representing an “un-American” presence, Latinas/os, like Texans, merely represent a “distinctive way of being American” (pp. 4, 11, 178).

Though complicated with conflicting desires and contradictory temptations, the foregoing pronouncements represent a difficult but inevitable conversation about ethnoracial crossing and the future of race in the United States, a con- versation in which Afro-Latinas/os ought to have a natural, if not a leading role among the speakers. Afro-Latinas/os, by virtue of their unstable ethnoracial loca- tion, are ideally positioned to embody “public admissions of racial impurity,” to escape the logic and the legacy of the “one-drop rule,” subvert the racial imagination, and consequently undermine the very “notion of race” (Rodríguez 2002: 202). In Brown: The Last Discovery of America, his intensely personal and no less compelling meditation on ethnoracial identity, Richard Rodríguez notes that “Race is America’s theme – not freedom, not democracy (as we say in com- pany),” and he envisions a time when the United States will dare to speak the truth about its brownness, the history of cross-racial copulation that the children of John Rolfe and Pocahontas or Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson would seem to epitomize. White supremacy in the United States begot a situation in which only whites could enjoy the freedom to escape racial identity, embodying unmitigated personhood and humanity, while everyone else remains condemned to the prison of their racialized blood (pp. 140–1). Provocatively, Rodríguez says he wants for African Americans the same freedom he would like for himself, namely the freedom “to admit brown” (p. 142). During a 2002 interview on the

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program Now with Bill Moyers, Rodríguez gave a poignant example of the coun- try’s resistance to acknowledging its brownness by pointing to the irony that at the ceremony where the film industry congratulated itself for giving an Academy Award to Halle Berry as a “black actress,” the Oscar recipient was sitting right next to her white mother. When we learn further that Berry’s parents divorced when she was only four, and that it was her mother who raised her, the irony that her absent African American father should count as the only racial pro- creator becomes bitter. The episode patently shows blacks and whites colluding in the preservation of a consensus that regards “a white woman capable of giving birth to a black child but denies that a black woman can give birth to a white child” (Fields 1982: 149).

Afro-Latinas/os, again because of the discomfort of their ethnoracial location, bring to the table of conversation a history of necessary familiarity with the reality of brownness, to borrow the useful image invoked by Rodríguez. We should acknowledge, however, an earlier use of the term “brown” which did not overtly denote racial crossing. The Research Institute of the Bureau of Negro Affairs in 1930 began publication in Philadelphia of a periodical that promoted the interests of the black community under the title The Brown American. The periodical ceased publication in 1940, and the following year the National Associ- ation of Negroes in American Industry revived it as its official organ until 1945, when it finally disappeared, having been superseded by The Negro Statesman. But the usage that Rodríguez invokes does have meaningful precedents. In 1931, Edwin R. Embree opened his book Brown America with this tiding: “A new race is growing up in America. Its skin is brown. In its veins is the blood of the three principal branches of man – Black, white, and yellow-brown. The new race numbers twelve million in the United States, and other millions in the West Indies and Central America” (Embree 1931: 3). The emergence of the “new race” did not disturb Embree’s quiet. On the contrary, he viewed it as the necessary solution to the race problem in the country: “As to the future of Brown Americans, I am a confirmed optimist. The race problem in the United States, which in the dark decades following the Civil War seemed completely baffling, no longer is among the difficult questions of the nation” (pp. 284–5).

Evidently, Embree’s extreme optimism failed to do justice to the gravity of racial reality in the United States. Today, three quarters of a century after his words appeared in print and a civil rights movement having brought about significant transformations, we still cannot exclude race from “the difficult ques- tions of the nation.” Apart from ethnoracially differentiated statistics about incarcerations, unemployment, school desertion, and substandard housing, the state of race today may be deduced from the figurations of the specialists on the matter. An edited volume entitled Beyond Racism presents us with a good sampling of recognized specialists who gathered to explore questions of racial inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. But rather than herald- ing the “end of racism,” the volume closes with an appeal by Charles V. Hamilton to the societies in question to upgrade their investment in formal education to

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help the disempowered victims of exclusion better to protect themselves from the legacy of racism (Hamilton 2001: 597). The aspiration seems to be for the development of appropriate palliatives to treat the victims of a recognizably perpetual source of stress. But one need not grant racism such a timeless ontology; one may instead assert that existing as it does in history and within the sphere of social relations, racism must correspond to the perishability of all other products of human creation. Perhaps we have never been as well equipped to speed up its dismantling as we are at present.

Like others before me, I envision a vulnerable spot in the structure of racism, given its fundamental susceptibility to cross-racial copulation, the process of browning that Rodríguez has explored. Naming it “amalgamation,” David A. Hollinger has chronicled its continued growth since the second half of the twen- tieth century. The 1990 Census reported rates of out-marriage for Latinas/os at 33 percent, for Asian Americans at about 50 percent, for Native Americans at about 60 percent, and for African Americans – as defined by the hypodescent standard – at 10 percent (Hollinger 2003: 1385). The persistence of negrophobia among the other ethnoracial minorities as well as among whites and a stronger sense of ethnic self-affirmation among blacks, which may express itself at times as a reticence to mingle carnally with whites, probably explain the lower rates of out-marriage for African Americans, but even the 1990 numbers represent a substantial increase as compared with the 1980 Census figures. Besides, for all groups involved we need to consider the significance of non-marital cohabitation at a time when, as Hollinger observes, the percentage of formal marriages has continued to diminish. Furthermore, the new wave of genealogical research has begun to shed new light on the history of interracial commingling dating back to the violence of the slavery period, with approximately 30 percent of African Americans who take DNA tests to determine their lineage finding that they descend from Europeans on their father’s side (Willing 2006). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who, as host of a 2006 PBS documentary (African American Lives) that focuses on nine black celebrities who underwent genetic testing, has found his own ancestry to be 50 percent white (Willing 2006). This discovery confronts us with the irony of ethnoracial belonging, given the leadership of Gates, as Chair of Harvard University’s African and African American Studies Department and champion of successful projects committed to disseminating knowledge about the black experience, in the process of shaping black identity from the academy.

The idea of proposing amalgamation as an ethnoracial destination for the US population is not new. To invoke it, says Hollinger, is to reclaim the vocabulary of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Noting that between 1913 and 1949, 80 percent of Asian Indian men married Hispanic women in California, a state with a long history of marital relationships between Punjabis and Mexicans, Gary B. Nash contends that racial interbreeding has been a constant in American society from the earliest colonial moment to the present (Nash 1995: 948–9). Nash draws attention to the attempts by Thomas Jefferson and John Hancock to promote intermarriage between Indians and

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whites, and he cites the Afro-Indian ancestry of Crispus Attucks as emblematic of the long history of marriage between Native Americans and African Amer- icans (pp. 945–7). Nor could the idea of carnal intermingling have been entirely absent from the mind of Martin Luther King, Jr., who viewed integration as the necessary next step following desegregation. When people of different ethnoracial origins integrate, biology is bound to put on its show. In that respect, the 1967 United States Supreme Court ruling on the case Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia, which put an end to over three hundred years of anti-miscegenation laws on the land, came to complete the fluid interracial mobility of bodies made legally possible by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, the legislation that struck down the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” legislation.

Knowing Ourselves Ethnoracially

Latinas/os are no less vulnerable to the deleterious consequences of allowing socially suicidal bodies of lore to determine the way the young understand and affirm their ethnoracial identity. Left to their own devices, unmentored in the difficulty of speaking meaningfully about the social and existential meaning of one’s ancestry, they often fall prey to a sort of representation served to them by the commercial media that reduces their heritage to entertainment figures, symbols, and forms. They thus fail to recognize the insult hurled against them in “positive” essentialisms that celebrate the community’s warm, affectionate, and rhythmical nature, the presumably less flattering qualities of sobriety, calcula- tion, and thoughtfulness staying under the control of the mainstream “Anglo” population. They accept, in other words, a representation that relegates them to the realm of body and feeling in contradistinction to whites who inhabit the sphere of mind and thought. As a result, a situation emerges that often allows the status quo to get away with including Latinas/os only symbolically, granting them space primarily in the realm of expressive culture, the way the 2000 National Convention of the Republican Party clearly evinced. Rhythmical and sprightly Ricky Martin appeared on stage singing “La Vida Loca” and dancing vivaciously as the Party’s nominee, George W. Bush, amid the cheer and applause, braced himself for the upcoming presidential election. Contrastively, the Party flaunted its inclusion of African Americans by more than just bring- ing them on stage to provide diversion and merriment. As Colin Powell and other conservative members of the Party came to the speaking podium to share with the country and the world a vision of the future for blacks under the aegis of a Republican administration, African Americans received intellectual and political roles.

Largely untutored in the complex matter of ethnoracial identity, young Latinas/ os might even fail to see the offense involved in such promotional material as was circulated in connection with the 4th Annual Latin Grammy Awards held in Miami on September 3, 2003. The publicity campaign espoused by the producers

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of the show included the poster-size image of a sensually sculpted, scantily clad young woman’s body sitting on an unseen bench with her hands resting on a drum placed between her widely open legs. Her bronzed skin oiled to a lustrous glow, the cleavage of her prominent breasts accentuated by slightly hunched shoulders, she has her head bent backwards and leaning gently to the right as her physique reflects the contortion of some powerful surge cruising through her veins, an impression marked by her closed eyes and her total surrender to the erotics of her ineffable sensation. Beneath the image of the alluring body a legend reads: “Feel the Latino.” The slogan’s ambiguous injunction invites at least two interpretations. By watching the Latin Grammy Awards we can share in the Latina/o trance that the young woman is undergoing, or, by consorting with the young woman’s eroticized body, we can experience “the Latino” that she incarnates. Nor is it clear whether the publicity campaign had envisioned the invitation to Latinas/os or non-Latina/o audiences nationwide to “feel the Latino,” since one would suppose the former already had “it” and presumably had no trouble “feeling” it of their own accord.

Most perturbingly, we have no grounds for supposing that young Latinas/os will not embrace the understanding of “the Latino” as something that one “feels” as if possessed by a spirit, especially when summoned by the music’s irresistible power. Their ethnoracial education, I insist, prepared them well to defend themselves from any shame-inducing vilification they might encounter in the society’s surviving white supremacist structures and practices. A 1972 project authored by William E. Cross, Jr. and Manuel del Valle y Colón, which sought to elevate the Puerto Rican population’s self-esteem by adapting to the group an existing model of black awareness, illustrates the vehemence with which the older generation took on the task of inculcating in the young an enhanced sense of ethnoracial selves. The project contemplated that “becoming conscious of one’s Puerto Ricanness may allow the Puerto Rican to program Puerto Rican identity, resulting in that positive self-image which is the prerequisite for Puerto Rican pride and self-determination” (cited in Falcón 1995: 205). Today, the zeal of such a message would seem odd, bordering on the passion of religious conversion rather than on the political strategizing that agendas of community empowerment call for. Perhaps the formidable battle that the earlier generation of marginalized minority leaders had to wage some four decades ago consumed their concentration, depriving them of the serenity to envision a time in the future when the terms of the struggle would no longer call for waving flags of reactive identity, that is, when the young would need to master the skills required for living in a diverse society. Perhaps at the time they could not afford the serenity to instruct the young in the complexity of identity which, a fluid rather than a solid, one should always regard as unfinished.

To do justice to the complexity of identity even at the height of a fierce antiracist struggle one may have needed the vision of a leader with the capacity to imagine eternity. It was probably his religious humanism that enabled King to promote racial self-affirmation among African Americans as a protective shield

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against negrophobic racism, but to do so while imagining a scenario in which, the godliness of every individual having been recognized, “ ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted” (King 1986: 122). As he made clear in his 1950 speech “The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness,” King celebrated African American racial pride, but he never wavered in his resolve to proclaim “the solidarity of the human family.” He recurringly stressed the message that “All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” and he had the foresight to warn against the danger of becoming “victimized with a philosophy of ‘black supremacy’ ” (pp. 121–2, 200). King’s atypical vision did not find great resonance in many secular black or Latina/o leaders, who, for the most part, remained absorbed by the tyranny of the historically immediate, seeking merely to instill in the consciousness of their people effective safeguards against present vilification. As a result, they bequeathed to the subsequent gen- eration essentialized, hardened, and therefore simple ideas of identity, which, as in the case of Latinas/os illustrated above, the powerful commercial media have found all too easy to manipulate and trivialize.

Heirs of a hardened and simple idea of identity understand themselves on the basis of a homogenous us whose ontology emerges in contradistinction to an equally homogenous them. Ignoring the barriers of gender, class, and ideology that often set segments apart within differentiated populations, they fail to recognize conflict and contradiction as necessary features of any attempt at approximat- ing a picture of the whole. It is difficult for those who understand their group monolithically to detect inequality and injustices except when these wrongs originate outside the community, the homogenized “them” monopolizing the function of oppressor as the essentialized “us” officially inhabits the rank of the oppressed. Thus, homophobia, misogyny, religious biases, and ideological con- servatism have a field day when they occur internally. Anti-Indian practices, negrophobic exclusions, and fundamentalist nationalism go unchecked when they occur internally. Worse still, hardened and simple ideas of identity overlook the inescapable fact that knowing one’s ancestry takes work, and that defending it requires ideological sophistication. During my initial contact with the leaders of the Quisqueya Club at Cornell University in the 1990s, I learned of an initi- ative to bring to the campus a major figure from the Dominican Republic to highlight the importance of Dominican history and culture. I gasped when a young Dominican student leader mentioned Joaquín Balaguer as the guest being considered. Because of their youth, born after 1966–78, the period when Balaguer ruled the country by means of theft, murder, incarcerations, and widespread corruption, the Cornell students did not share my ideological contempt and moral repugnance for the character. They simply viewed him as a successful statesman who, after accruing under his belt three presidential terms from 1966 to 1978, had returned to power in 1986 to rule the country for yet another decade. With their distance from the ancestral homeland, having been born in the United States or arrived in the country while still too young to have a

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political memory, they had no automatic way of knowing the fraudulent means Balaguer had employed to win each one of his elections.

Fortunately, the plan to invite Balaguer to Cornell to boost Dominican pride on campus did not go through, and I most certainly hope my words of discour- agement may have contributed to that outcome. But the extremes to which ignorance or ideological indifference can mar celebrations of ethnoracial ancestry that assume monolithic understandings of one’s people became shockingly clear to me in spring 2000 at Syracuse University during a Latina/o awareness week sponsored by the one Hispanic fraternity on campus. Among the salient activities of the week’s program was an exhibit of pictures of great Latina/o and Latin American leaders from different historical periods. Held at one of the lecture halls in the student center, the exhibit included the likeness of heroes going from Benito Juarez, to Jose Marti, to Cesar Chavez, with their respective biographical notes highlighting their achievements. My mouth dropped when I saw the Dominican hero chosen to grace the Latina/o pride exhibit – none other than Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, whom the biographical sketch at the bottom of his picture lauded for having served as president of his country for 30 years and having brought stability and order to Dominican society. I pulled the Dominican member of the student organizing team aside to ask, with inevitable urgency in my quivering voice, if he knew that the three decades of Trujillo’s “presidency” was actually a dictatorship, that his autocratic, totalitarian regime ran a reign of terror that involved hundreds of political assassinations, thousands of prisoners, many of whom faced lugubrious torture chambers, and that the angel of fear haunted the Dominican population during the tyrant’s 30-year rule. I explained further that Trujillo managed the country as a personal hacienda, appropriating a vast portion of the state’s wealth, and that, among other affronts to humanity, he perpetrated the genocidal massacre of thousands of Haitian immigrants and Haitian-Dominican residents of the border towns in the fall of 1937. I have no way of knowing whether the Dominican student whom I tried to awaken as to the evil of Trujillo and the gravity of including him among the Hispanic leaders whose legacy we ought to memorialize subsequently had occasion to reflect on my words of objection. But, at the time, he resorted to asserting his freedom of choice, formulating the irrefutable retort that probably not all Dominicans felt about Trujillo the way I did.

These identitarian moments, from the Latin Grammy publicity campaign to the anointment of Trujillo, illustrate to me the urgency of conveying to the young in ethnoracial groups that are socially compelled to affirm themselves that they cannot approach the understanding of what they are carelessly. That knowing their identity, which is fluid and complex, is a labor intensive and analytically intricate operation. If they fail to do the homework that the task requires, they put themselves at the mercy of the hardened and homogenized ideas and images fed them by the commercial media and the most objectionably exclusionary ideologues. They also voluntarily collude with the logic and rituals of racism, invigorating its currency and protecting it from extinction. I return to

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Afro-Latinas/os as the one minority group which, by virtue of its unstable location in the existing paradigms of identity, seems uniquely equipped to discredit the presumptions of ethnoracial ontology. Because Afro-Latinas/os, assailed by vari- ous corners of their assorted ancestry, cannot achieve comfort in their ethnoracial selves, they lack the luxury of deploying genetic self-confidence in their thinking about what they or others can do on account of their blood. I would speculate that it came as no surprise to Afro-Latinas/os that the Japanese could play salsa and merengue with a verve that many had considered the exclusive property of Puerto Rican and Dominican performers. Many will now recall the rise on the popular music scene of the all-Japanese band Orquesta La Luz. That Dominicans did not hold a monopoly on talent for merengue had already become evident beginning in the 1980s, when a flowering of Puerto Rican performers of that musical form, especially women, rose to the top of the charts internationally. The cross-national or cross-ethnic “intrusion” may cause the chagrin of militant cultural nationalists – the refrain in a plena sung by Lucecita Benítez says “canta la música tuya que yo cantaré la mía” (“you sing your music and let me sing mine”) – yet there is nothing new about the practice if we think of classical European music. The blackness of Leontyne Price did not prevent her from enriching the sound of Italian opera. Nor did the Asianness of Seiji Osawa ever get in the way of his excelling at conducting the symphonic works of a Russian composer named Tchaikovsky. Who would have thought that during the first World Baseball Classic tournament in the spring of 2006 Japan would snatch the victory over the teams representing the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, countries where the sport has attained a near cultural value? All this calls for the affirmation of this simple proposition: there are no cultural genes. Afro-Latinas/os are well poised to understand the overarching implications of that proposition in the realm of social interaction. As such, they enjoy a privileged vantage point to promote the deracialization of all our selves with the hope of corroding the logic and rituals that have for long sustained the racial wall in the national imaginary.

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