Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer A. Jones and Tianna S. Paschel (eds.)Afro-Latin@s in MovementAfro-Latin@ Diasporas10.1057/978-1-137-59874-5_1

1. Introduction: Theorizing Afrolatinidades

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau¹ , Jennifer A. Jones² and Tianna S. Paschel³

(1)

Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA

(2)

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

(3)

University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

In 1978, Afro-Puerto Rican salsero Ismael Rivera released the song Las Caras Lindas (de mi gente negra) [The Beautiful Faces (of my Black People)] in his album, Esto Sí Es Lo Mio. Written by Afro-Puerto Rican Tite Curet Alonso, the song celebrates the beauty and resilience of mi gente negra in the face of widespread racism and injustice. Since that time, a diverse group of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latino musicians have recorded the song, including Afro-Cubans, Celia Cruz, and Adalberto Álvarez y Su Son; Afro-Peruvians, Susana Baca and Eva Ayllón; Afro-Colombian, Lisandro Meza; and the Afro-Puerto Rican folkloric group, Yubá Iré; among others.¹

Las Caras Lindas (de mi gente negra) is one of the defining tracks for two important Afro-Puerto Ricans who shaped the island’s popular music. One of the most prolific salsa composers of our time, Curet Alonso often tackled political issues in his songs, such as workers’ rights, colonialism, and the injustices of slavery. He was also known for composing songs that specifically addressed contemporary racial issues; as salsa legend, Cheo Feliciano reflected, It wasn’t normal at the time he began doing it, but he always talked of what it meant to be Black, and he had the courage to say he was proud of who he was.² Curet Alonso wrote Las Caras Lindas for Ismael Rivera, another Afro-Puerto Rican musical icon. Rivera began his career with Rafael Cortijo y su Combo, a band that not only revolutionized popular music with its unique blends of Afro-Puerto Rican traditions but also one that broke important racial barriers on television and in elite performance venues.³ Rivera’s distinctive performance style, masterful improvisational skills, and unique voice were all rooted in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Puerto Rican aesthetics. Las Caras Lindas became one of his most popular hits.

Despite its strong connections to Puerto Rico, the song did not specifically detail places, histories, or figures unique to the island. Instead, the lyrics offered a more general message that celebrated the resilience and beauty of black communities. To be sure, the song’s message was, and remains, relevant in Puerto Rico, where antiblack racism persists despite rhetoric that extolls the racially mixed great Puerto Rican family. At the same time, the lyrics also resonated with Afro-Latin American communities throughout the region, as well as with Afro-Latinos in the United States, who faced similar forms of antiblack racism, evident in the multiple recordings of the song since 1978 by artists such as Peruvian Susana Baca, Colombian Lisandro Meza, or Cuban band Adalberto Álvarez y su Son, among others. Indeed, whether from Peru, the United States, Colombia, or elsewhere, each version of Las Caras Lindas retained Curet Alonso’s original message of black pride and overcoming adversity.

We might assume that part of the song’s tremendous success, as well as the frequent rerecordings of the song by other Afro-Latin American performers, stems from the recognition of Las Caras Lindas as an important contestation of racism, which many members of these communities could relate to. And yet, each rendition of the song contains localized sounds and instrumentation, from the cumbia accordion riffs of Colombian Lisandro Meza to the cajón beats of Peruvian bands. This is because blackness—or the socially constructed meanings and qualities associated with being black—differs depending on distinct national and historical contexts. Accordingly, the remakes of Las Caras Lindas locate the message in very distinct national contexts and reflect diverse approaches to integrating blackness into their respective national identities. In this sense, they retained the song’s overall message that celebrated blackness to counter the comparable forms of antiblack racism their respective communities faced, while they also employed musical aesthetics oftentimes linked to local African-based traditions that rooted this message in very specific geographic and historical contexts.

Perhaps one of the more interesting examples of Las Caras Lindas’ impact on sites outside of Puerto Rico was its use in a 2005 Colombian census campaign that Afro-Colombian activists named after the song. Beyond encouraging people to identify as black on the census, the campaign also advanced a definition of blackness as being rooted in a shared history of slavery and ongoing experiences of racial discrimination.⁴ Thus, the census campaign employed the song celebrating resilience and blackness as part of an explicit protest of internalized antiblack racism in Colombia. These multiple renditions of Las Caras Lindas clearly demonstrate how the circulation of cultural practices across geographic borders impact local understandings of blackness, which, in turn, are linked together via recognition of similar experiences with anti-black racism in the Americas. In this sense, the popularity of Las Caras Lindas across different historical periods and geographies underscores the need for a transnational understanding of afrolatinidad.

Much of the work on afrolatinidad has been conducted from one of two geographical camps: Latin America and the Caribbean, or the United States. However, there are many reasons to move toward a more transnational understanding of afrolatinidad. First, the Americas have been shaped by massive and continual migrations of people, which further complicates the idea that our understandings of Afro-Latin America can be reasonably distinguished from the study of Afro-Latinos in the United States. The circulations of Afro-Latinos throughout the hemisphere are embodied in the large Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central American diasporas in places like New York City, as well as lesser-known cases like Afro-Mexican migrants who have settled in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Second, the Americas are a region characterized by the constant exchange of ideas about race and nation among political elites, as well as among Afro-Latino and Afro-Latin American citizens who sought to challenge hegemonic nationalist projects. While in recent decades, these political encounters have taken the form of various attempts to build a Pan-Afro-Latin American movement, in the early part of the twentieth century, they consisted of intellectual exchanges between Afro-Latin American and African-American thinkers such as Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, who collaborated not only creatively, but in a transnational critique of antiblack racism. Together, these circulations have not only profoundly shaped identity formation processes, but have also catalyzed the emergence of inherently transnational cultural forms such as salsa, champeta, and reggaetón. Further, as the Las Caras Lindas example demonstrates well, such cultural expressions are often especially politicized in the context of Latin America.

This perpetual movement of people, politics, and culture undermines the separation of the study of Afro-Latin America from that of Afro-Latinos in the United States. Building on scholarship that has taken more diasporic approaches to thinking about race, marginalization, and antiblackness, Afro-Latin@s in Movement foregrounds the inherently transnational character of afrolatinidad. In bringing together innovative essays on both Latin America and the United States, this volume takes a decided hemispheric and transnational approach. While the works included here span both geography and time, what they share is an analysis of the dynamic and continual circulation of people, cultural representations, and politics. We suggest that such a transnational approach—that analyzes the shared articulations of blackness across the Americas, but which also takes seriously their unique manifestations and movements across space—offers a more complete understanding of the politics of race and nation in the Americas.

Blackness and Latinidad in the Americas

Scholarship on blackness in Latin America has deep roots in the political struggles over race and nation in the region. The first wave of scholarship emerged in the early twentieth century when newly independent Latin American nations were making sense of their past, present, and future. After decades of policies aimed at whitening the population, Latin American political elites turned to mestizaje narratives that held that, rather than lead to mongrelization, the phenotypic and cultural mixture of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples was in fact the strength of the region. Although countless works have analyzed these nationalist narrative shifts, we rarely think about the scholarship that undergirded such ideologies. While some nationalist thinkers such as José Vasconcelos in Mexico and José Martí in Cuba advanced their ideas of racial transcendence through political theory, many others who we also hold as nationalist figures based their ideas on robust empirical analyses of slavery and of contemporary society.

Authors such as Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, Tomás Blanco in Puerto Rico, and Gilberto Freyre in Brazil shared similar scholarly approaches, which greatly influenced how individual nations understood the racial makeup of their populations.⁵ This scholarship emerged primarily in the places where enslaved Africans came in greater numbers and over longer periods of time (e.g. Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean).⁶ More importantly, these scholars emphasized what they argued was an inherent racial egalitarianism in their societies, which they saw as directly linked to racial mixture itself. Finally, Freyre, Blanco, and Ortiz used historical and anthropological analysis to make the definitive case for the importance of race mixture, and particularly, the value of African culture, in the construction and future of their respective nations. In this way, they saw themselves as offering a direct challenge to dominant ideas based in scientific racism and eugenics that placed whiteness or Europeanness at the top of the social order, and blackness or Africanness at the bottom.

These thinkers did, in fact, challenge some aspects of biological essentialism, namely, the idea of an objective and singular racial hierarchy with pure whiteness as its pinnacle. However, these ideological projects were rife with deep contradictions. First, these nationalist thinkers often restricted the African contributions to the nation to particular areas: music, dance, food, physical strength, and sexual prowess. In so doing, and perhaps inadvertently, they reproduced the very racial hierarchy they sought to subvert. Indeed, following this logic, Africans did not give Brazilians and Puerto Ricans their intelligence or ingenuity, but their sense of rhythm.

Second, while these thinkers largely saw themselves as moving beyond biological essentialism, ideas of racial difference based in the blood still pervaded their writings. What is more, to the extent that they left biological essentialism behind at all, they often replaced it with a type of cultural essentialism that often reified the problematic idea of African culture as static and monolithic.⁷ An article written by Gilberto Freyre in 1952 further highlights these various contradictions:

Brazilian quadroon or octoroon girls have a special charm that harmonizes peculiarly with the forms and colours of the tropical landscape. It is rarely attained by completely White girls or girls with only a touch of Indian blood. And it is common, now, in Brazil to observe, in even the whitest Brazilian girls, a sort of subtle or indirect imitation of this type of feminine beauty or grace, as in the Negro’s rhythm of walking, and her grace in dancing and smiling.⁸

Despite these serious tensions, these mid-century works on blackness in Latin America inspired an entire generation of scholars who similarly held that race relations in this region were unique, especially when compared to the United States. In Brazil, these works even traced the country’s racial egalitarianism to a more benevolent and cordial system of slavery.⁹

The second wave of literature on blackness in Latin America, spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, largely emerged in response to the previous accounts of Latin American exceptionalism.¹⁰ Beginning with the famous UNESCO studies on race relations in Brazil in the 1950s, this work was done by sociologists and historians concerned with challenging the previous era’s idea of racial paradise and revealing systemic patterns of racial inequality.¹¹ Outside of Brazil, other scholars also produced scholarship that pointed out similar contradictions and patterns of inequality in their countries.¹²

Though, if Brazil dominated the first two waves of studies of blackness in Latin America, geographic expansion primarily characterizes a third, contemporary wave. Alongside the cases where we typically locate blackness in Latin America were an increasing number of important works on the lesser-studied cases (e.g. Peru, Argentina, and Mexico). This period also marked the emergence of a more interesting set of substantive questions about the articulation of blackness across historical periods, and across sites of contestation. Rather than being caught up in the same debates about whether or not these countries were racial paradises, what has marked scholarship of the last few decades is an attempt to uncover the ways in which race and racial logics mattered for social, political, and economic relations in these countries. Indeed, the question shifted from asking if race matters in Latin America, to asking how it mattered.

This led to a proliferation of scholarship on blackness in Latin America in a number of important, substantive directions. First, scholars reexamined how blackness figured into statecraft and nationalist ideologies¹³ and also offered deeper analyses of how race patterned inequality in this region.¹⁴ The second dimension of expansion was by discipline; the third wave of scholarship on blackness in Latin America was produced not only by sociologists and historians but also by a diverse group of scholars interested in the politics of identity and everyday life in contemporary Latin America.¹⁵ Beyond state practices, a plethora of work examines blackness and racial formation at the micro and meso levels, theorizing identity formation on the ground as well as examining the role of popular culture in shaping social identities and articulating a racial politics.¹⁶ The expansion of disciplinary perspectives and research foci also foregrounded the profound entanglements of blackness with gender and sexuality.¹⁷ Together, these works offer a clear window into how dominant ideas of blackness are constructed, reproduced, or challenged in these countries. Third, in contrast to previous accounts that had largely ignored black political mobilization, these new works sought to explore this issue head-on. In so doing, they asked important questions about the conditions under which black identity did or did not become politicized, as well as the relationship between black identity and other bases of political organizing, such as class and region.¹⁸

Arguably, the main impetus of this expansion was the rapidly changing political and ideological context in these countries. Indeed, in the 2000s, several scholars tried to make sense of the increased politicization of blackness throughout Latin America, and the shift in the orientation of many states in the region around racial questions.¹⁹ Whereas very few Latin American states collected data on their black populations in the twentieth century, by 2010, nearly every country did.²⁰ More importantly, a number of them—Nicaragua, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia—also recognized the collective rights for certain black populations for the first time. In the latter two cases, states also adopted affirmative action policies.²¹ This radical change not only prompted scholarship that tried to make sense of how and why these policies came about but also analyzed their implications for politics and society.²²

Taken together, these works have offered textured, multifaceted, and locally situated answers to the question of how blackness gets articulated in the Americas. Rather than reproduce the idea of Latin American countries as racial paradises, these accounts point to the ambiguities of race in this region, what Peter Wade has referred to as the absent presence of race.²³ On the one hand, we see a picture in which race is fluid and racial categories are far from discrete, permanent, or necessarily salient in the way that ordinary people make sense of their lives in these countries. On the other, they show convincingly that despite its mutability, ideas of racial difference are deeply entrenched in social relations across this region. Indeed, despite much variation across countries, blackness seems to function as an abject, immutable category, a symbolic container for everything bad in these societies. Thus, Latin America is perhaps best understood as a region that shares profound tensions between mestizaje and antiblackness, between inclusion and othering, and between essentializing and transcending race.²⁴

Yet while this scholarship is incredibly useful in framing the chapters in this volume—and for thinking about afrolatinidad more generally—it fails to take transnationalism seriously save for a few notable exceptions. For example, in 1980 Pierre-Michel Fontaine put forth the concept of Afro-Latin America, which he defined as all regions of Latin America where significant groups of people of known African ancestry are found.²⁵ Building on this concept, historian George Reid Andrews defined Afro-Latin America as those regions or societies where people of African ancestry constituted at least 5–10 percent of the total population. Further, he emphasized that the boundaries around Afro-Latin America were constantly in movement, and as such we should understand it not as a fixed or immutable entity but rather as something that ebbs and flows.²⁶ We share this idea of afrolatinidad as inherently mutable. However, rather than speak of movement in purely demographic terms, we suggest that afrolatinidad is fundamentally a product of broader movements—of culture, people, and politics—across national boundaries and within the Americas. We now turn to the literature on Latinos in the United States to see if it might offer an important bridge—analytically and metaphorically—to understanding afrolatinidad in a more transnational way.

Latinidad in the United States

Latinidad in the United States has long been understood as both a demographic and political puzzle—an ongoing social and political project rather than a given. Scholars such as G. Cristina Mora, Clara Rodriguez, Laurie K. Sommers, Arlene Dávila, and others, have decisively argued that Latinidad has been constructed and produced, not merely through individual processes of identity formation, but through micro-, meso-, and macro-level processes. At the macro-level, scholars have argued that Latino identity has been shaped through migration and immigration policy,²⁷ domestic legislation and court cases,²⁸ and through the US government’s efforts to count Latinos (albeit not consistently until 1980) through the US Census. At the meso-level, Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others, used social movements, the media, and nongovernment organizations, to negotiate what it would mean to be Latino and who would belong.²⁹ And at the micro-level, individuals make choices daily regarding the ways in which Latino identity is made meaningful.³⁰

Underlying these processes of constructing Latinidad from the very beginning has been the issue of race. Since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which conferred official white status on Mexicans who would now be residing in US territory, the question of race among US Latinos has been a contentious one. The meaning of Latino identity, and whether it was racial, has long been skirted in US policy, in which Latinos alone have been counted as an ethnic group. Similarly, desegregation cases in Mexican-American communities were decided not as a result of racial discrimination, but because Latinos were deemed to have experienced a special class of discrimination based on language and ancestry.³¹

Relatedly, scholars have argued that while Mexicans retained legal status as whites, they were never perceived that way by Americans. Puerto Ricans were, alternately, valued for their whiteness and derided for their blackness, and at times imagined to be a distinct racial group, as is the case with Nuyoricans, or Puerto Ricans who live in New York.³² Despite the historical presence of Afro-Cubans in the United States, Cuban-Americans were imagined as white with the potential to assimilate into the American mainstream, until the arrival of large numbers of Afro-Cubans with the Mariel boat lifts in the 1980s complicated these assumptions.³³ Since then, the influx of new groups of Latinos such as Panamanians and Dominicans has further complicated the relationship between race, blackness, and Latinidad.

Other scholars, such as Jorge Duany, José Cobas, Rubén Rumbaut, and Leo Chavez have highlighted that the perception of Latinos as perpetual foreign threats has also racialized Latinos in particular ways. From this perspective, Latinidad emerges from a consistent and persistent experience of othering and economic disadvantage in the US context. This process, they argue, is what has conferred a unique shared experience on Latinos who only become Latino within the US context, and whose experience is made meaningful through exclusion and discrimination. Of course, the question of the internalization of this category remains, as while nearly 40% of Latino census takers have consistently opted to check some other race rather than black or white on the census, the vast majority of the remainder select white.³⁴ Some scholars have interpreted this pattern to mean that Latinos are asserting a racial category that is neither black nor white, while others perceive these results as an attachment to whiteness, perhaps consistent with identities in the home country, or perhaps in an effort to accrue social and political benefits, not unlike those reluctantly conferred on Mexicans at the turn of the twentieth century.³⁵

As a result, much of the debate over Latinidad in the United States has sought to tackle the question of race, and whether such a label can apply to all Latinos as one group. In response, many Latino Studies scholars embrace fluidity and ambiguity as a defining part of the Latino experience. Perhaps ironically, just as attachments to mestizaje began to fade in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of US Latinos borrowed mestizaje to argue that there is something uniquely mixed about Latinos that both gives them collective meaning and transcends national origins.³⁶

Much of this work was produced on the heels of social movements such as the Chicano movement of the 1960s, which embraced Aztlán as their spiritual homeland and as the crux of Chicano identity, while also distancing it from blackness.³⁷ In a similar vein, Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal Borderlands/La Frontera and collaboration with Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back,³⁸ both exemplified and cemented the influence of this narrative in the US context, arguing for an identity politics that embraces being both mixed and between. In this way, Anzaldúa produced what Juan Flores has called Latino Studies’ guiding metaphor of la frontera, which brought to the fore an understanding of Latinidad shaped primarily by both movement across borders, racial and national.³⁹ In subsequent decades, this conceptualization of the US Latino as a mestizo, transnational subject, has been at the core of much of the scholarship that seeks to articulate Latinidad.⁴⁰

Transnationalism has also been central to the construction of Latinidad, in part because of the significant movement of people across borders.⁴¹ The growth of the Latino population into the largest minority group in the United States, its increasing national, ethnic, and racial diversity since the 1980s, and the rising numbers of Latinos in virtually every state, continue to make immigration central to theorizing Latinidad. Because distinctive citizenship policies shape the experiences of national origin groups in profoundly different ways, many scholars and policymakers alike wonder whether Latinos’ diverse origins and transnational attachments may preclude an internal sense of cohesion, or serve as the source of it. Indeed, what binds Latinos today, many would argue, is a set of meanings and experiences that are linked to assumptions about the migration process. Whether it is being perceived as foreign, holding ties to Latin America, or experiencing discrimination, it is this aspect of Latino identity that is distinctly American. It is also a subject that is understood as deeply transnational, as bodies move back and forth. In the United States, immigration continues to be framed both productively and problematically as a Latino issue, infusing Latinidad with a necessarily transnational subject position.

Yet for all its progressive liminality, blackness is largely omitted from academic constructions of Latinidad in the US. In part, this is shaped by the unique race rules of the United States, in which hypo-descent historically defined blackness. More broadly though, it is the way in which Latinidad has been constructed as sometimes black, or aspirationally white, on the one hand, and nonwhite, mestizo, or brown, on the other, that has precluded, by definition, the possibility of a Latinidad that is compatible with blackness. For example, recent debates over whether to reformulate Latino into an official race category on the US census necessarily omit consideration of Afro-Latinos as part and parcel of the Latino category.

As a result of these assumptions, Afro-Latinos have been deeply marginalized from mainstream Latino discourse, both political and academic. It is this alienation that prompted Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores’ assertion that afrolatinidad requires a triple consciousness.⁴² Building on Du Bois’ conception of double consciousness in the United States, Jiménez Román and Flores posit that afrolatinidad adds another challenging layer to the racialized experience, undermining dominant conceptions of Latinidad, blackness, and Americanness as incompatible identities. Triple consciousness thus makes evident the ways that, as Tanya Kateri Hernandez argues, Afro-Latinos, and therefore blackness, remain unintelligible within our understandings of mestizo Latinidad, and therefore outside of the Latino imaginary.⁴³

Toward a Transnational Blackness

There is much lost in the separation of literature on race in Latin America and that of Latinos in the United States. On the one hand, the scholarship on Latinos in the US takes as a point of departure something that is a guiding premise of this book, that Latinidad is inherently raced and transnational. Yet the literature on Latinidad also comes with much of the conceptual and political baggage of mestizaje, which is being vigorously debated and destabilized in Latin America today. On the other hand, by centering blackness and problematizing mestizaje, the literature on race in Latin America gives us many conceptual tools for understanding how afrolatinidad is constructed, how it is lived and contested, and how it changes over time. Even so, it focuses on a bounded idea of blackness as being articulated exclusively within the nation-state, rather than through cross-national flows.

While the literatures on (Afro-)Latin Americans and (Afro-)Latinos have been largely conceptualized as distinct, some scholars have addressed the ways in which conceptions of race and identity flow across borders, especially in regard to understanding US Afro-Latino identities. In Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, and Afro-Latinos, editors Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler aim to bring together scholarship from the United States and Latin America that emphasizes the flow and counterflow of racial ideas.⁴⁴ They argue that a transnational approach is critical to understanding blackness and Latinidad across the Americas in view of the current circular or return migration patterns of people of Latin American descent to and from the United States and the potential impact of this demographic phenomenon in redefining racial and ethnic relations in this society, understanding the historical and contemporary racial representations in Latin America, as well as how these are being transplanted and reformulated in the context of U.S. racial ideologies.⁴⁵ Similarly, Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores argue that any understanding of the [U.S.] Afro-Latin@ experience must be guided by a clear appreciation of the transnational discourse or identity field linking black Latin Americans and Latin@s across national and regional lines.⁴⁶ More recently, literary scholar Claudia Milian proposed the concept Latinities to attend to the fluidity and contestations around US Latino identities in part to emphasize their connections to blackness.⁴⁷ This volume takes heed of this insistence to approach afrolatinidad transnationally. However, rather than assume the unidirectionality of these flows, we demonstrate that the movement of ideas of blackness is multivalent, continuous, and ever-changing.

Acknowledging the shifting dynamics of afrolatinidad from a hemispheric perspective opens up the space to ask new empirical questions. For instance, how do ideas about blackness move across the Americas, not only from the US to Latin America but also from Latin America to the United States? How do people’s ideas about blackness shift (or not) when they encounter new forms of politics or cultural representations from elsewhere? How are we to make sense of the politicization of blackness in Latin America both historically and in the contemporary period when we consider the types of transnational exchanges that are so central to this book?

In this volume, we consider how the concept of afrolatinidad challenges the racial projects of Latin America and US Latinidad in ways that take into account both the local specificities of race, and the patterns of antiblack racism that exist throughout the Americas. For example, Latin America is obviously not immune to the global system of racialized modernity that privileges whiteness in culture, policy, law, epistemology, and everyday life.⁴⁸ Beyond the aforementioned formal nation-building projects that marginalize blackness, antiblackness has become common sense in Latin America, ranging from racial humor,⁴⁹ to beauty politics,⁵⁰ to popular idioms.⁵¹ Similar issues can be found among Latino communities in the United States. For example, media and popular culture representations of US Latinos tend to privilege a mestizo look, limiting images of Afro-Latinos to very stereotypical tropes or making them virtually invisible while simultaneously reproducing beauty standards that privilege whiteness.⁵² US Afro-Latinos also relate personal experiences with racism within the Latino community, ranging from everyday microagressions to larger structural issues that prevent equal access to jobs and other economic opportunities.⁵³ That such similar stereotypical and disparaging perceptions of blackness exist throughout the Americas moves us away from assumptions that Latin America is either uniquely raceless, or that Afro-Latinos are somehow prone to pathologically deny their blackness.⁵⁴

Instead, our concept of afrolatinidad seeks, in part, to examine how comparable stereotypes of blackness move and take root in various parts of the Americas in ways that sustain antiblackness throughout the region, despite what many consider such dramatically different national discourses about race. Indeed, the above examples refute the assumption that any anti-black sentiment in Latin America is a product of the region’s (neo)colonial relationship with the United States. Rather, they identify Latin America as a region that has contributed to global antiblackness, but in ways that are specific to its unique social, political, and historical contexts. Therefore, our understanding of afrolatinidad takes into account both the systemic antiblack racism throughout the region as well as the specific ways these manifest in state projects, cultural productions, and everyday life. In this sense, our concept of afrolatinidad thus aligns with Agustín Laó-Montes’ suggestion that, while the term Afro-Latino refers to the ethnoracial backgrounds of peoples of African descent in Latino/America, Afro-Latina/o as a subalternized diasporic form of difference should be transformed into a critical category to deconstruct and redefine…narratives of geography, memory, culture, and the self that otherwise foster the marginalization and/or invisibility of these communities.⁵⁵

While afrolatinidad sheds light on the movement of stereotypical tropes of blackness across boundaries, it also highlights the possibilities of establishing new connections between Afro-Latin Americans and Afro-Latinos, and with other African diasporic populations as well. For instance, several scholars have demonstrated how the traffic of ideas about blackness between geographic sites offered important tools and strategies for local communities fighting against racial inequality around the globe. Furthermore, such exchanges become crucial for establishing and elaborating diasporic connections across the African diaspora, including among Afro-Latin Americans and Afro-Latinos.⁵⁶ By foregrounding circulation, afrolatinidad brings a fruitful addition to African Diaspora Studies, whose theorists have largely neglected to incorporate Afro-Latin Americans or Afro-Latinos into their analysis, a curious omission given the substantial black population in the region.⁵⁷ We center the diverse connections forged between Afro-Latin Americans, Afro-Latinos, and other diasporic populations, either through in-person collaborations or through the movement of ideas about blackness, as part of a larger strategy to combat antiblack racism. Just as it is important to consider the movement of antiblackness across borders, it is equally important to think about the ways that the movement of blackness across sites presents possibilities of imagining and creating more inclusive futures.

Finally, in Afro-Latin@s in Movement, we are not suggesting an abandonment of specificity entirely. It is impossible to understand afrolatinidad without an understanding of mestizaje both as a state project and as a practice of everyday life. However, in conceptualizing afrolatinidad, we must pay equal attention to the transnational flows that impact local racial dynamics. Ideas about blackness have always traveled across the Americas via processes of migration, cultural representation and exchange, and political organizing. This exchange is not new, but rather has occurred throughout history, as several of the chapters in this volume demonstrate (e.g. Castillo-Garsow, Fusté, and Pereira). As we argue in this essay, sometimes this movement has produced progressive and liberatory understandings of afrolatinidad (e.g. in this volume, Herrera, Rivera-Rideau), while at others, the exchange of ideas about blackness has reinforced notions of black inferiority (e.g. in this volume, Malcomson, Gosin, Thompson-Hernández). Nonetheless, the movement of afrolatinidad has very real consequences for how people imagine their place in the world, and how they develop strategies for combating racism in their communities (e.g. in this volume, López Oro, Modestin, and Paschel). Afro-Latin@s in Movement, then, demonstrates how afrolatinidad emerges via the movement of ideas about blackness across the Americas in ways that sometimes solidify racial hierarchies, but, at other times, illuminate and provide the conditions of possibility for social transformation.

Outline of the Book

Afro-Latin@s in Movement is a collection of cutting-edge scholarship, creative works, and essays that examine and highlight the complexity and interconnectedness of afrolatinidad, underscoring its fundamentally diasporic and transnational character. The pieces in this volume use empirical insights to draw out the importance of movement in shaping afrolatinidad. To emphasize these contributions, we have divided the book into three sections that capture some of the key conceptual dialogues in Afro-Latino and Afro-Latin American Studies Studies: identity, history, and politics. These sections are separated by photo essays by Walter Thompson-Hernández and Umi Vaughan that capture well the main themes of this book.

In Part I, Imagining Afrolatinidades, introduced by cultural theorist Jossianna Arroyo, authors Hettie Malcomson, Paul Joseph López Oro, and Monika Gosin examine the ways in which afrolatinidad is conceptualized, imagined, and constructed across space and over time. Considering the ways in which transnational dialogues shape our understandings of blackness in place, Malcomson, López Oro, and Gosin demonstrate how race is constructed through the lens of national identity, influencing racial meanings and practices both locally and transnationally. By unpacking this process, each author considers the question of visibility more critically, interrogating the racial inscription process in Mexico, the United States, Cuba, and Honduras. Walter Thompson-Hernández’s autobiographical essay on his experiences of race and blackness in the Mexican Basketball League lends personal insight to our understanding of racial imaginaries, while Umi Vaughan’s arresting photographs remind us of the importance of the body and visual cues that shape race as lived experience.

Part II, Rethinking the Archive, is introduced by historian Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and includes scholarly works by authors Melissa Castillo-Garsow and Patricia Herrera. In this section, we aim to reconsider texts, interrogating the silences and assumptions in our historical knowledge that have frequently omitted Afro-Latino stories. Castillo-Garsow engages this approach by recuperating the history of Maymie de Mena of the UNIA, while Herrera unpacks the sonic archive of Olú Clemente to reveal new insights into Afro-Latino culture and history. These works are complemented by Panabay Pride, a conversation between Petra Rivera-Rideau and the Afro-Panamanian hip-hop duo Los Rakas, who locate their Afro-Latino sensibilities in the cultural space of Oakland, California. This section also includes a photo essay by Walter Thompson-Hernández, whose exploration of Afro-Latinos in Los Angeles ties together race and space in unexpected and provocative ways.

Part III, Diasporic Politics, considers the flows of politics across borders, challenging simplistic formulations of US racial imperialism and replacing them with examples of complex transnational dialogues that intend to undermine existing racial politics and inspire new ones. Political scientist Juliet Hooker introduces this section, which includes scholarly works by José Fusté and