TLP: Tell us about your work and how your work contributes to contemporary Afro-Latinx studies

OZZ: As a scholar who is preoccupied with highlighting AfroLatino popular culture through literature and media, I have come across moments where AfroLatinidad, as a concept and identity discourse, is being used in a way that depoliticizes and decenters Black lives. We must not only re-center blackness, but also the codes that make up what we come to understand as negro or Black. My using of negro or blackness is about centering experience, people, memories, and archives that our cuerpos negros create. Our Black bodies are crossroads where archives and knowledge production meet. What happens when the narratives of AfroLatinos/as/xs are excavated, replicated, and materialized into cultural production? If we consider the embodied archive or representation of the experiences of transnational AfroLatinos/as/xs, we must acknowledge how that archive reconceptualizes this 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 epistemology and ways of knowing?

 These are some of the broader questions my work tends to. In particular, my work highlights the ways AfroLatina women theorize their Blackness, gender, sexuality in transnational spaces. My scholarly work is always accompanied by my poetry as a way of bridging the gap between the community and academia. I tell stories about my own Black embodiment. I bring my family and ancestors into the text with me alongside the theorization. I want to create scholarship that is rigorous, readable and accessible to other young AfroLatinas exploring the theoretical tools their ancestors gave them. I write about Cardi B as a knowledge producer. She’s an AfroLatina theorist. My work pays homage to the AfroLatinas in our communities who through their own embodied archives—which include the sacred, the violent, the joyful, and the erotic—are creating an epistemology that opens up portals into new possibilities for existing.

TLP: Tell us, what does it mean to be named the inaugural Miriam Jiménez Roman Fellow?  

 OZZ: Miriam was a force to be reckoned with. To me, she was a pioneer, an elder in my intellectual community. I met her and Juan Flores during my first year of graduate school when I wasn’t sure that a project like mine would be recognized in academia and how to do my community justice by showing up for them. Miriam affirmed and validated how important it was for me to write about the knowledge production and experiences of AfroDominicanas in the diaspora. Every time I saw her, she always had a consejo, an experience to share, a way of talking through ideas and theorizing with me. She always made me feel seen and like I wasn’t mistaken. The Afro-Latin@ Readeropened up some pathways in my own thinking through my experience and identity. This book gave me the language to my experience. It was the key that led to my scholarly work. I’m sad because we lost a real one. An intellectual auntie, trailblazer, friend, and mentor—someone I felt at home with because she was kind and an intellectual moral compass that did not allow me to forget why I do the work I do. 

 Being the inaugural fellow means I get to continue honoring her legacy by being unapologetic in my work and purposeful in my steps. I want other AfroLatinas/os/xs who come from a similar background as mine to read my work and feel like they’re seen, affirmed, and validated. To know, that someone like them—who comes from a working-class background, first-gen, daughter of immigrant parents, daughter of a single a mother, daughter of a formerly incarcerated man—thought it important the kind of knowledge created in those informal spaces such as the Dominican beauty salon, the bodega, over dominoes and rum in the city. Dominicans may not always speak directly about Blackness, but it is in the opacity and in the everyday ways that it is always there—the praxis.