Queer, Trans Black Latinidades as Arteries of the Americas
Cover of When Language Broke Open, photo courtesy of Alan Pelaez Lopez.
The colonizers say she was born dirty,
She never forgets,
She’s never allowed to,
They don’t get the majesty of her Black skin.
- Ivanova Vera de Jesús
"The colonizers say she was born dirty," writes Houston-based Dominican community organizer and poet Ivanova Vera de Jesús in her poem "Where is Home?" The text mediates on the ongoing negotiation that Black subjects in the hemisphere must navigate as they become witnesses and stewards to the heart of Abya Yala. "The colonizers say" names the fact that narrativity and stories have been weaponized to secure the project of settler occupation. "She was born" affirms the immediate existence of Black femme aliveness::Black flesh::Black being. "Dirty," in the poem, performs three acts: 1. It is a signal to the earth, situating Black life in kinship with land as opposed to Black enfleshment as outside of land or Blackness as invasive, 2. Dirty names an attempted denigration of Blackness. Here, attempt is key because "Dirty" pushes Blackness onto dark matter, 3. The push is generative as the dirtiness of dark/Black matter points to what feminist scholar Ra Malika Imhotep (2022) names a "dirty possibility” defined as "embrace(s) of the honest truth of Black bodies whose varied labors have always produced sweat, funk, and desire.” Black femme aliveness—in de Jesús's poem—is the dark/Black matter of blue blood turned red at the moment of oxygenation::is the dirty possibility that makes Black queer, trans life an artery of the Americas.
“I knew Black queer Latinidades mattered, but because my trans and queer life is so mundane, I didn’t understand exactly how much we mattered.”
As the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent, I knew Black queer Latinidades mattered, but because my trans and queer life is so mundane, I didn’t understand exactly how much we mattered. Not until reading the work submitted.
De Jesús’ declarations of both "The colonizers say” and “Dirty” haunted me for weeks. In the haunting, I kept reflecting on questions I received requesting clarification on what constituted Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latinidad. In the introduction to the volume, I write:
“When the call for submissions went out on social media, writers were excited, confused, and provoked. Emails with questions about what constituted ‘Latin American descent’ came in. A writer born in Trinidad and Tobago wrote asking if they would be considered Latin American or Latinx as someone whose ancestors migrated from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago. There were numerous Haitian American writers asking if they met the qualifications to submit since they shared the same island as the Dominican Republic, a clearly canonized Latin American country. I affirmed each email and encouraged submissions. Some submitted; some did not.”
These hauntings are part of the colonial legacy of Latin America and the Caribbean. Settler-conquistadors set arbitrary borders that we now enforce by outlining what countries can and cannot be constituted as part of Latin America and the Latinx diaspora.
In light of this, I want to uplift the fact that the writings by Afro-Surinamese lesbian scholar Gloria D. Wekker, whom I cite and address in the introduction, influenced When Language Broke Open.
When we begin to conceptualize Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, Belize, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago as part of Latin America (not solely the Caribbean), what we do is break settler borders and settler epistemologies of geography open. In this case, we follow de Jesús’ rigorous practice of solidifying and defending the position that Black kin have a critical relationship to land. At the minimum, this is a queer Afro-Latinx method of transing geography.
For example, in “Sugar,” Haitian-American writer and visual artist Edgie Amisial centers the lives of two Haitian girls, one in the voice of the author (an upper-middle class, 12-year-old girl) and Rose (a 14-year-old girl and domestic worker in the house of Madame Saint-Ford). The story’s title derives from the first time the narrator witnesses Rose being robbed of her childhood: The narrator and her grandmother are visiting Madame Saint-Ford when Rose, the child domestic worker, brings tea. Madame Saint-Ford spits out the tea in protest of no sugar having been added, claiming Rose has tried to poison her, and demanding Rose drink the tea.
“Often, Afro-Latinxs have to argue that there is a racial issue in Latin American and Latinx countries, not just a class issue.”
Amisial writes, “Rose was not a thing. Madame Saint-Ford turned to look at me and my grandmother, perhaps expecting us to share her disdain, or to be entertained by the whole scene. Instead, her face fell flat once she noticed my fearful eyes.” It is in this moment of recognition that Amisial nuances the Afro-Latinx narrative: Often, Afro-Latinxs have to argue that there is a racial issue in Latin American and Latinx countries, not just a class issue. However, when we center a Black Latin American country like Haiti, we have to look at colorism and classism together. This is one analytic that Amisial offers Afro-Latinx letters: to think past the basic argument that racism exists by looking at the quotidian lives of people who simultaneously feel the effects of race, class, and gender, not just one.
While the lead character in Amisial’s “Sugar” is dark-skinned and one can assume, Rose is too, the story’s nuance pushes us to think about what film historian Charles I. Nero (2017) coined as “differently Black,” a simple yet rigorous term that refuses to flatten the Black experience by declaring that every single experience is different. Amisial provides a story of two Black, dark-skinned Haitian girls. One from the gated community of Belle-Ville and the other from the Cité Soleil, an impoverished commune on the island. These two differently Black realities help us understand Black Latinidades as ever-expansive and always in response to systems of power and oppression. For Amisial, we cannot reduce Black life to a life of poverty; instead, it requires nuance to further understand the different financial, gendered, aged, and labor-based experiences across the diaspora.
As a Haitian American, Amisial locating her short story in Port-au-Prince is also an act that offers Afro-Latinx writers a blueprint of how to be in an ethical and nuanced relationship with their heritage country should they want to base their creative writing there.
Akin to Amisial, the poetry of Guyanese-American writer Zoë Gamell Brown punctures the volume in a generative way. In “Justice Served,” a poem composed of five quartets, Gamell Brown speaks with honesty: “Tonight I cry / For people lost / Lives unlived / Love unfulfilled,” and as she bears witness to the world around her, Gamell Brown ends the poem asking: “When will we/ Truly be free?/ And do we know / What freedom means?”
The splice created in the last two questions is crucial to Afro-Latinx Studies. Readers don’t know who the “we” is and thus, in the first question the splice created by “we / Truly” leaves a sense of suspense. I want to argue that Gamell Brown knows that we can no longer afford to cut up Black life into categories of Anglo Black, Latin Black, Dutch Black, French Black, and so forth. When it comes to Black aliveness—the political vision that demands Black people alive in the future—Black diasporic folk need each other. Here, the “we” becomes an “us.” As in, we differently Black kin are in relation to each other so we better act right and be accountable; we better imagine a collective outside the essentialism created by the nations that govern us and/or nations we currently reside in. Gamell Brown’s second question, “And do we know / What freedom means?” invites us to contribute to her labor and ask more questions: Who, what governs my freedom? Is the freedom I have particular to my geo-political experience? Or is it a freedom particular to someone else’s that I normalized and took for my freedom, too? What does it mean to live?
Gamell Brown’s poetic decrees are in direct conversation with the memoir essay penned by Guatemalan-Belizean American writer and choreographer Estrellx Halcyon Quetzal Supernova (EHQS), who ends their writing by asking: “How do I use language to create an identity that doesn’t implement the language of the oppressor, that is spacious enough to hold my multiplicity and process of becoming?” and “How do I create containers that allow for grief to emerge, be witnessed, and act as a catalyst for my individual and our collective liberation?” These questions gesture toward a desire to be in a community that cares not about the identities we hold, but our “process of becoming.” This is one of the pillars of trans* life: the perpetual arriving to a becoming that transgresses the coloniality of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and love.
May we all commit to the “process of becoming” better relatives so that we can reach EHQS’ vision of a “collective liberation,” because as they note, the individual is needed in the planning, but the individual is nothing without the collective.
Alan Pelaez Lopez is an artist and scholar based in Oakland, California. They are the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020) and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona Press, 2023).