Celebrating “The Afro-Latin@ Reader” at Ten
Ask any Afro-Latino/a/x — Afro-Latin@ or Afro-Latine — what helped shape their identity and you’ll receive a bevy of responses. Some may reference their upbringing, traditions steeped in Blackness that began at home, while others may note an incident that reminded them that their Latinidad was always in question. For those in academia, there’s one text that crystallized their lived experiences, seamlessly including first-hand reflections navigating race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and sexuality, to name a few identifiers, alongside historical accounts of Blackness from the 16th century in what is now known as the U.S. to the early 2000s.
Published in 2010 by Duke University Press, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, is the answer to what many were seeking not only in academic spaces, but their everyday lives. The legacy of The Reader, as well as the legacies of Miriam and Juan, continue to date. Ahead of “The Future of Afro-Latinx Studies” symposium, The Latinx Project invited several scholars to reflect on the impact of The Afro-Latin@ Reader, 10 years later, and how it has shaped the current state of Afro-Latinx Studies.
Tanya K. Hernández, professor at Fordham Law and author of Multiracials and Civil Rights and “Afro-Latin@s and the Latino Workplace” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader
It is hard to believe that an entire decade has already passed since the publication of the seminal volume The Afro-Latin@ Reader. It is hard to believe, because the book's insights are as powerful and necessary today as they were when it was first published. Not only did it put Afro-Latin@s on the map as a subject for serious scholarly research, it did so by both detailing the rich cultural lives of Afro-Latin@s, along with realities of anti-Black bias within Latin@s communities themselves. The ability of the volume to so successfully encompass both agendas, is in no small part because of the leadership of its editors and in particular Miriam Jiménez Román.
As a contributor to the volume myself, I fondly recall working with the Afro-Latina scholarly powerhouse known as Miriam Jiménez Román. Like Arturo Schomburg, Miriam was an erudite bibliophile on African Diaspora matters and brought that to bear on all her editorial work. Despite the fact that I submitted a previously published essay to the volume, Miriam challenged me to reflect on additional issues for an even more meaningful revision of the essay. But Miriam's knowledge was not merely an intellectual exercise but instead a platform for pursuing social change long before the term "scholar-activist" was popularized. In her passion for the production of knowledge about Afro-Latin@s, Miriam asked the tough questions and demanded rigorous analysis. The Afro-Latin@ Reader, that she marshalled from burgeoning idea to a cross-disciplinary anthology contributing to Latino Studies, African-American Studies, Ethnic Studies and more, is the perfect embodiment of her intellectual excellence. None of the work on Afro-Latin@s would be possible today without the foundational text of The Afro-Latin@ Reader. This year simply marks the first of what will surely be many more milestone anniversary celebrations in the future.
Jonathan Rosa, professor at Stanford University and author of Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race.
The 10th anniversary of The Afro-Latin@ Reader’s publication is an important moment in which to reflect on its profound historical reframing of race, ethnicity, and empire. Synthesizing insights regarding Black Latinx experiences across the Americas from the beginnings of European colonial expansion to the present moment, this powerful volume goes far beyond simply challenging Black Latinx erasure by including Afro-Latinidad into existing scholarship in Black and Latinx Studies. Instead, vanguard editors Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, along with dozens of leading thinkers in this increasingly influential field of study, challenge readers to examine what is at stake in the systematic ignorance and obfuscation of Black Latinx praxis. The result is not only a profound reckoning with anti-Black racism in Latin America and the US, but also a new set of theoretical and political possibilities for drawing connections among sites of African diasporic life previously obscured by homogenizing frameworks of mestizaje. Perhaps the most striking evidence of The Afro-Latin@ Reader’s impact is the broad body of scholarship and popular discussion it has inspired, signaling a promising future for a field poised to unsettle and reimagine cultural, linguistic, geopolitical, and ethnoracial borders.
Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, associate professor at Michigan State University and author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature.
The Afro-Latin@ Reader is a product of many, many years of work. You can see that in what Miriam and Juan put together, it was a labor of love and respect for Black histories and Black lives. And, it is really clear to me that it foreshadowed the kind of insurgent work in Afro-Latinx Studies that was to come, while it also paid lots of respect to the work that had been done in the past, bringing in established voices; unheard, unseen, forgotten voices alongside a new generation of scholars, and the reflections of Afro-Latinx lived experiences.
One of the things that I really appreciated about The Reader, as someone who loves stories, storytelling, and literature, is the testimonies and the space given for people to tell their personal stories about being Black, especially the section on Black women and the attention to gender and sexuality. The attention to that lived experience was really important to me because oftentimes when doing work on Afro-Latinidad or Afro-Latinx Studies, one can move through that world, through this field, and just do the historical stuff with no attention to the person. You can produce a very detached intellectual project, but the anthology pushed away from that in a way that I found really beautiful and radical. Those are some of the most impactful essays, and my students always connect to them. They really showed everyday Black experiences are good enough, just as good, just as valid as the historical essay or a sociological interpretation of a particular moment.
For me, it really broke away from the kind of hierarchy of knowledge of the academy and how it forces us to think of our personal experiences as unimportant in the larger arc of our work and lives.
Pablo José López Oro, assistant professor at Smith College
I was 22 years old when Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores came into my life. It was my first time participating in an academic conference and I was just starting my second semester as a masters student in Latin American Studies at the University of New Mexico. I was presenting my preliminary findings for what would be my masters thesis on Garifuna feminist political subjectivites in Enlace de Mujeres Negras de Honduras (ENMUNEH) at the inagural confenrece of the Afro-Latino Working group "Beyond Visbility:
Rethinking the African Diaspora in Latin America" at the University of California, Berkeley. Miriam and I bonded over our beloved New York City, working-class households, and our Black Latinidad. I remember her telling me “Pablo, we are working on a Reader that I wish I had when I was in graduate school. It would have saved me from a lot of headaches.” And no other words could be more truer. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Duke University Press, 2010) was precisely the trailblazing blueprint that I needed and so many of us needed to articulate our existences, our histories, our politics, our cultures, in a way that built and added upon Blackness in the Americas.
Miriam and Juan were my friends, mentors, comrades in the afrolatin@ forum. Their intellectual footprints opened up a space for my work to exist at the intersections of Black Studies, Latinx Studies, and Gender & Sexuality Studies. The Afro-Latin@ Reader is an edited volume that broke ground in multiple ways in communities from activists, cultural workers, political analysts, poets, non-profit organizers, and academics, bridging a dialogue on Latinas/os/xs of African descent in the United States whose cultural lineage/heritage is rooted in Spanish-speaking Latin America and the Caribbean and whose Blackness was hemispheric, national, local, and regional. The nuanced and complex beauty of The Afro-Latin@ Reader is that it brought a wide range of voices and histories into an academic press that highlights the political and activist histories of Black Latinxs in the Americas that could not simply be bounded up in the ivory towers of the academy. While the study of Black life in Latin America and the Caribbean is far from a new intellectual enterprise, having now benefited from over a century of rich archival and ethnographic studies, the 584-paged edited volume points to Miriam’s visionary and activist intellect shifting the field of Afro-Latin America to the Global North of the United States: Afro-Latinx Studies. By expanding the terrain of Blackness in the Americas, students, teachers, activists, and scholars of AfroLatinidades in the United States have a gem for generations to come.
Danielle P. Clealand, associate professor at University of Texas at Austin and author of The Power of Race in Cuba: Racial Ideology and Black Consciousness During the Revolution.
When The Afro-Latin@ Reader first came out, I was in graduate school in North Carolina and went to Duke University Press’ office to buy the book. There are few purchases I remember from ten years ago, but there was such excitement around a volume that finally spoke to our experiences as Afro-Latin@s. Miriam Jiménez
Román was someone who challenged me to think about what kind of work I wanted to do and who I wanted to be as a Black Latina scholar. She served as a mentor to so many and this reader was a representation of that mentorship and her role as a pioneer of Afro-Latin@ Studies. Ten years later, I still go back to this volume and find parallels to my work and my everyday. Each semester, my students reflect on narratives of anti-Blackness that have always existed in their lives, but were veiled with colorblind exceptionalism. The Reader gives us the conversations, thought and narratives that were long sidelined in and outside of academia and relegated to our own intimate circles.
Afro-Latin@s bridge different racial and ethnic communities but our identities, experiences and politics are largely understudied. The Reader has served as the foundation to fill that gap and carved out an essential space for Afro-Latin@ scholars to write about ourselves: To write about Blackness and Latinidad in the United States. We do not fit into what is constructed as Black or what is constructed as Latin@. For this reason, so much of our work that was pioneered by the Afro-Latin@ reader is about expanding our definitions, methodologies, and understandings of race and ethnicity. The Afro-Latin@ Reader continues to be a force in its recognition that Blackness in our communities is sometimes fluid, often essentialized, always complex, and seldom recognized. The Reader takes on the anxieties that these complexities produce in a country that marginalizes and compartmentalizes Blackness, while simultaneously celebrating us and our histories. Happy Anniversary to The Afro-Latin@ Reader, and all my love and gratitude to our soldier, Miriam Jiménez Román.
Janel Martinez is a multimedia journalist & the founder of award-winning blog, Ain't I Latina?, an online destination celebrating Afro-Latinx womanhood. The Bronx, NY native holds a BA in Magazine Journalism & Sociology from Syracuse University. Her writing has appeared in Adweek, BuzzFeed, ESSENCE, Oprah Magazine, & Remezcla, among other publications. She is a frequent public speaker discussing media, culture & identity, as well as diversity at conferences & events for Bloomberg, NBCU, SXSW, Harvard University & more. Her work will be included in the forthcoming anthology, Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed, which will be published in fall 2021 by Flatiron Books.