Focusing on the Present and Future of Afro-Latinx Studies
Danielle de Jesus, “For Henrietta Wood.” Oil, acrylic, newspaper, and fabric on linen
Ahead of “The Future of Afro-Latinx Studies” symposium, inaugural Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow (2020-21) reflects on the impact of The Afro-Latin@ Reader, 10 years later, and how it has shaped the current state of Afro-Latinx Studies. For more information and to register for the event, click here.
While I was finishing up my undergraduate degree at University of Chicago, in the winter quarter of 2011, I received The Afro-Latin@ Reader as a gift from my Chicana bestie’s mother. Her mother felt I would connect to it and thought it was important for me to have a copy. Her parents had been neighbors of the late Juan Flores when he had lived in California. Life at UChicago as a first-gen Afro-Latina was a challenge. At the time, I did not have the vocabulary to name and further understand the anti-Blackness I had experienced as a working-class, Black Dominicana growing up in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, which was a predominantly non-Black Puerto Rican ‘hood.
When I was a grad student at UT-Austin, I met Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan at a conference in 2013. During their keynote panel, Miriam’s remarks stood with me and created a space for me to understand and to think about, as she said, “how the Americas experiences us, and how we experience the Americas.” Meeting Miriam and Juan, along with engaging their work has reminded me time and time again to be true to myself and my community. This is what I strive to do in my work as a scholar who is concerned with the way that Afro-Latinas create knowledge and theorize from the flesh. In particular, I am interested in how Black, working-class Latinas in the diaspora create and proliferate knowledge that is informed by their racialized, gendered, and classed experiences. Here, the intersectional identities of these women—intersectional identities that go beyond the scope of these categories I have named—have been decentered in ways that have dangerously replaced Afro-Latinidad as a marker of culture that is depoliticized, commodified, and deracialized. As Afro-Latinidad becomes a concept that the broader public engages with, I urge us to not lose sight of the political, socio-economic realities that Black Latinos move, live, and breathe within.
One of the ways I have encountered the depoliticization and deracialization of Afro-Latinidad, is when non-Black Latinos lay claims to it as their own identity. I look at them and I am certain that their bodies are not as policed or surveilled within those Latino spaces as say, mine, or other visibly Black Latinos. Case in point, earlier this year, when a successful white professor who claimed to be Afro-Latina revealed herself to be just a white girl from Kansas City—I was confused. How was it that the embodiment of whiteness had laid claims to a Black Latina identity that it did not embody? In claiming that identity, what did her “Black Latina” embodiment allow her to experience? What kind of Black embodied knowledge can an imposter possibly create from her white experience? I ask this because for us, visibly Black Latinas, our Blackness is not something we can escape. It follows us everywhere. Our Blackness is not something we put on or take off when it’s convenient for us. Our Blackness is the thing that allows others to question and/or reject our knowledge production, our epistemologies, our credentials, our experience, our work—it is an eternal gaslighting. So when “Afro-Latinidad” alongside Black Lives Matter becomes trendy and commodified—where did the difficult and uncomfortable conversations about Blackness, or “lo negro,” get dropped off?
The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, edited by Miriam Jiménez Román & Juan Flores. (Duke University Press, 2010).
When Bronx-born, Puerto Rican-Cuban rapper Fat Joe says in an interview, “We are all Black” or when white Latinas/xs/os say, “I’m Afro-Latinx too” they are invisibilizing and minimizing the socio-economic and violent everyday realities of visibly Black Latinas/xs/os. When I ask, why or how is this happening? My scholar friends remind me that this is normal of practices of mestizaje where the racial triage (white, Black, Indigenous) can be Black too. In other words, non-Black Latinas/xs/os laying claims to Blackness, or Afro-Latinidad, is only another way of reinscribing mestizaje and white supremacy by failing to name whiteness and usurping Blackness as part of their own racially-mixed identities. I am not suggesting that anyone in particular has the authority to decide how one should identify, but if there is something that Afro-Latinidad and Negritud (Blackness) speak to, is that which is mentioned by the late Juan and Miriam in their edited volume, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, where the fact of Blackness as invoked by Frantz Fanon as experience is central to Afro-Latinidad’s definition—a phenomenology. We must not only recenter Blackness this way in Afro-Latinidad, but also the codes that make up what we come to understand as negro. I use “negro” here, as a way of acknowledging the transnational experience, people, memories, and archives that our cuerpos negros (black bodies) create. Our Black bodies are crossroads where archives and knowledge production meet.
Resisting translation could also be a way of avoiding death by archivalization in both digital and analog. Not everything that is us, must be made an archive to be consumed by others. So what happens when the narratives of Black Latinas/xs/os are excavated, replicated, and materialized into cultural production? If we consider the embodied archive a representation of the experiences of transnational Black Latinas/xs/os, we must acknowledge how that archive re-conceptualizes knowledge production and self-making in the face of violence. Furthermore, what does it mean to write and perform the archives our Black bodies produce? What does it mean to center those Black epistemologies and ways of knowing when academia remains concerned with the ability to quantify, commodify, and hash out our Black lives into numbers for them to matter? How and where do we return and contribute to Black communities and stop the intellectual extraction and exploitation of Black labor in favor of our scholarly knowledge production? I ask this out loud here, to you reader, but I also ask this to myself as a reminder that I am indebted to my community of Black Dominicanas/xs/os everywhere. Conclusively, we should remember that Afro-Latinidad is first and foremost about Black lives, Black experiences, Black movement, Black translatability and Black untranslatability. The Afro-Latin@ Reader is that reminder.
Omaris Z. Zamora is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar and spoken-word poet. Her research interests include: theorizing AfroLatinidad in the context of race, gender, sexuality through Afro-diasporic approaches. Her current book project tentatively titled, Cigüapa Unbound: AfroLatina Feminist Epistemologies of Tranceformation examines the transnational Black Dominican narratives put forth in the work of Firelei Baez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Nelly Rosario, Ana Lara, Loida Maritza Pérez, Josefina Baez, Cardi B, and La Bella Chanel. Zamora pays close attention to how they embody their blackness, produce knowledge, and shift the geographies of black feminism in ways that recognize the legacies of Chicana/Latina and Black American feminist theory in the United States, but tends to the specific experiences of AfroLatina women and their multiple genealogies. The manuscript proposes “tranceformation” as a continuous process that engages with the spiritual aspect of self-making and centers the body as an archive that creates and transmits an AfroLatina feminist epistemological theory. Her work has been published in Post45, Latinx Talk, Label Me Latina/o, among others and has been featured on NPR’s Alt.Latino podcast. She fuses her poetry with her scholarly work as a way of contributing to a black poetic approach to literature and cultural studies.