Sept. 15 marks the start of Hispanic Heritage Month. Far too frequently Afro-Latinos here in the U.S.—people with both an African heritage and one from Spanish-speaking countries—aren’t prominently portrayed as representative symbols, nor are their contributions to U.S. history common knowledge.
We have communities here with people born or descended from Caribbean island nations where Spanish is the official language such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. There are also people from the Caribbean basin countries on the coasts of South America and Central America from regions of Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Colombia, and Venezuela. Additionally, there are Spanish speakers here from Aruba, Curacao, Belize, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Trinidad and Tobago. Each one of these groups has members who are Black of all or partial African descent.
The U.S. celebrates Black History Month and National Caribbean Heritage Month, and folks who fit into all three of these categories, including Hispanic, often fall through the cracks of all of them. Race, ethnicity, and nationality here in the U.S are often conflated or confused. Plus, the subject of racism within the Latino community is still a topic that many people don’t want to discuss or deny that it exists at all.
Join me today in that exploration and discussion.
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The issues surrounding Afro-Latinos have been an interest for me personally for more than 60 years, and academically for about 30. I am not Afro-Latina, however I have family members who are, and my husband defines himself as a Black Puerto Rican.
Having observed, and been affected by Afro-Latino history erasure in the school system, as well as racism and colorism within the Latino community, it has been something I’ve written about in the past. I’ve also fought against it as a member of the Young Lords Party, where addressing issues of race and racism within the community was a major part of our political agenda.
First things first, let’s look at some of the data collected in 2022 about Afro-Latinos in the U.S. by Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, a senior researcher at Pew Research Center:
Afro-Latino identity is a distinct one, with deep roots in colonial Latin America. As a result, it can often exist alongside a person’s Hispanic, racial or national origin identities. The life experiences of Afro-Latinos are shaped by race, skin tone and other factors, in ways that differ from other Hispanics. And though most Afro-Latinos identify as Hispanic or Latino, not all do so, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on a survey of U.S. adults conducted from November 2019 to June 2020.
In 2020, there were about 6 million Afro-Latino adults in the United States, and they made up about 2% of the U.S. adult population and 12% of the adult Latino population. About one-in-seven Afro-Latinos – or an estimated 800,000 adults – do not identify as Hispanic.
The racial groups Afro-Latinos identify with can be varied and diverse. When asked about their race on a Census Bureau-style question, about three-in-ten Afro-Latinos selected White as their race, 25% chose Black and 23% selected “some other race,” according to the Center survey. An additional 16% selected multiple races, while just 1% said they were Asian. Afro-Latinos who did not identify as Latino were more likely than those who did identify this way to mark Black as their race (59% vs. 17%).
El País in English recently featured an interview with Fordham University law professor and author Tanya Katerí Hernández, conducted by Paola Nagovitch, seeking to debunk the idea that racism doesn’t exist within the Latino community.
In the 1940s, in New York, a Puerto Rican woman named Lucrecia considered giving away her daughter, Nina, for one reason: the little girl was too dark-skinned and her hair was too curly. Lucrecia’s family pressured her to give Nina up for adoption to an African American family. Or to any family, it didn’t really matter, but it had to be as soon as possible, so that the girl’s complexion did not tarnish the “white” lineage that the family had taken such care to protect, despite being descendants of Black and Indigenous enslaved peoples in Puerto Rico.
Fortunately, Lucrecia chose to ignore her family’s demands. Years later, Nina would give birth to her own dark-haired, curly-haired daughter, Tanya Katerí Hernández. But unlike the childhood Nina endured in a home plagued by racism, Tanya grew up proud to be Afro-Puerto Rican thanks to her mother, who instilled in her a love of Blackness.
Hernández (New York, 60 years old) is today an expert in law, racial discrimination and critical race theory. Also a professor at Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, she has devoted her entire career to researching Latino Anti-Blackness: its origins, its manifestations in different areas such as labor and education, its consequences. … But above all, Hernández has focused her efforts on conveying what she has experienced first-hand and what she has later proven through her research: that racism exists within the Latino community. …
But for many Latinos, whose skin is lighter, their hair straighter, their noses and lips smaller, racism is a subject that has always been taboo. Anti-Blackness is considered, according to Hernández, to be someone else’s problem — specifically, a United States problem — because the myth persists that the Latino community is a mestizo community and, therefore, that mixed race makes it impossible for a Latino to be racist.
Hernández’s book, “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality” works to break down that myth and many others:
Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families.
The subject of intra-ethnic racism is not a new one. As far back as 2018, I wrote “Does Hispanic Heritage Month erase Afro-Latinxs?” That same year, Janel Martinez, Garifuna writer and founder of “Ain’t I Latina” wrote for Hip Latina about why Afro-Latinos shouldn’t be othered.
Being Black in a Latinx space is by design an othering experience. Just how melaninated you are, or tight and course your curls are, will determine which questions get funneled your way. As an adult, I now know these attempts to quantify how Latina I am and even validate my existence in said spaces are disrespectful and toxic to say the least.
I remember attending one of my first blogger events geared toward Latinx bloggers in 2014. … After a panel, I began chatting with two bloggers I’d never met about the information the panelists discussed. It was all cool until I was asked, “where are you from?” I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Honduras I shared. When I mentioned this, I could tell one of the bloggers was surprised. I took her shock as a sign she hadn’t met many Central Americans. I’ve gotten asked if I’m Dominican and Cuban—among other nationalities—but that was until she uttered her next question: “Which one of your parents is from Honduras?”
Now I was thrown off because I clearly articulated both were from Honduras. I was also annoyed I had to repeat myself because I’m certain she heard me the first time. But there was an unwillingness to accept I could also be Latina, like her, and a Black woman.
I also want to give a shoutout to News4JAX, a local station in Jacksonville, Florida, that aired several features about Afro-Latinos last year for Hispanic Heritage Month. Here’s one of them:
I’ll be paying close attention to U.S. media coverage in the upcoming month to see how much time is dedicated to Afro-Latinos. There is also the issue of how race, racism, and identification affect the vote and understanding of why some self-identified Hispanics can vote for and follow Trump/MAGA politics, such as Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for helping to organize the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In closing, I’m curious: What Afro-Latinos were you taught about in school, and if not part of the curriculum, where did you learn about them?
Join me in the comments section below for more, and for the weekly Caribbean News roundup.
