Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora

Moreno Vega, Marta, Alba, Marinieves, Modestin, Yvette

• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781611924602
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi ispano-americani

"My housewife mother turned into a raging warrior woman when the principal of my elementary school questioned whether her daughter and the children of my public school had the intelligence to pass a citywide test, " Marta Moreno Vega writes in her essay. She knew then she was loved and valued, and she learned that to be an Afro-Puerto Rican woman meant activism was her birth right.

Hers is one of eleven essays and four poems included in this volume in which Latina women of African descent share their stories. The authors included are from all over Latin America—Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela—and they write about the African diaspora and issues such as colonialism, oppression and disenfranchisement. Diva Moreira, a black Brazilian, writes that she experienced racism and humiliation at a very young age. The worst experience, she remembers, was when her mother's bosses told her she didn't need to go to school after the fourth grade, "because blacks don't need to study more than that."

The contributors span a range of professions, from artists to grass-roots activists, scholars and elected officials. Each is deeply engaged in her community, and they all use their positions to advocate for justice, racial equality and cultural equity. In their introduction, the editors write that these stories provide insight into the conditions that have led Afro-Latinas to challenge systems of inequality, including the machismo that is still prominent in Spanish-speaking cultures.

A fascinating look at the legacy of more than 400 years of African enslavement in the Americas, this collection of personal stories is a must-read for anyone interested in the African diaspora and issues of inequality and racism.

Bodies and Memories: Afro-Latina Identities in Motion

ANA-MAURINE LARA

The spaces that Afro-Latinas in the United States occupy are undefined spaces that result from the ways in which race has been constructed in U.S. society. Because of these constructions, and the institutions built around them, many Afro-Latinas are often not seen by Black Americans or by other Latinos. We must, in turn, push to be seen. The tendency among those of us who occupy this space is to go to the fear that “Afro-Latinas” and “Afro-Latinidad” lack definition. The response to this fear is often a desire to generate an essential articulation of identity and place: the notion that Afro-Latinas are one thing, or come from one set of places/experiences/histories.

In this essay,1 written in the personal voice, using personal pronouns, I will critically analyze the construction of Afro-Latina identities in the age of globalization. I will be using my body and identity, as well as the creative works of various Afro-Latinas as examples for my analysis, which includes: defining Afro-Latina bodies, flushing out Latina identities in the United States and making connections between the placement and the liberation of Afro-Latina bodies.

The Language in Which I Speak

In order to discuss Afro-Latinidad, I think it is important to first understand that race and racism are constructed differently in different societies, though their application may be the same (the control of colored female bodies by bodies that are not colored or female). Because we live in the age of globalization, and at a time where U.S. commodities, including cultural productions, are being propagated throughout the world en masse, I think it is important to lay the groundwork for my analysis on U.S. terms. There is, however, a caveat because these commodities include the sale and distribution of Afro-descendent bodies (in all forms of art and cultural production), whose distribution re-enforces already existent notions of race and belonging that reify U.S. myths around white supremacy. Simultaneously, because we are discussing Afro-Latinas, I am bringing in concepts that have shaped my particular experience as an Afro-Dominicana. These concepts have their own history, separate from the history of the United States, though still grounded in the policies of colonization I think they are very much affected and re-enforced by U.S. racial constructs disseminated by globalized media.

I live in the United States, where the myth of racial purity is based on two other myths: whiteness and the one-drop rule. I was born in the Dominican Republic, in the Caribbean, where the myth of racial purity is based on three other myths: hispanidad, blanqueamiento, indianismo (Hispanism, Whitening, indigenous). For the purposes of this essay, I will define these terms with an understanding that I speak as someone who is based at the heart of the empire:

Race is the social and economic value ascribed to a person or group of people based on perceived shared phenotypical characteristics (pigmentation, eye shape, facial form, etc). I believe this is a concept largely developed in the wake of colonization, specifically to justify the economic practice of the exploitation of some bodies by others.2

The concept of racial purity grew out of the race-based eugenics movement of the mid-nineteenth century. This scientific movement based on evolution and improvement of human heredity suggested such methods as selective breeding, birth control, genetic engineering and genocide of those deemed inferior. The foundation of the myth of racial purity is that there are separate races of humans, which should not mix so as to preserve the purity of blood lines.3

The term whiteness is used to refer to the socioeconomic and political privileges and powers ascribed to people who are phenotypically European or Caucasian. Because it is a concept that has been ascribed power and meaning, it has concrete violent ramifications on the lives of people who do not participate in whiteness, directly or indirectly.4

The one-drop rule is specific to the United States and was first used unofficially in the nineteenth century to determine the status of slaves, and then later on officially established as law in the early twentieth century at the onset of the Jim Crow era. The main purpose of the one-drop rule was to enforce racial purity and whiteness.5

Hispanidad refers to societies that were once under Spanish or Portuguese colonial rule, and as such, are constructed on the moral and ethical values of Iberian humanism, Catholicism, the Spanish and Portuguese languages, Iberian last names and blood. It is the notion that these societies are unified under these values, without conflict or question. It has been applied in nationalist rhetoric to evoke the supremacy of the state over individual communities and bodies—specifically, bodies that evoke non-Iberian references (Indigenous, African and Asian bodies in the colonial context).6

Blanqueamiento literally means whitening. It is a social concept based on and upholding hispanidad as the ultimate goal of individuals and families in society, placing great value on the attainment of presumed European phenotypic characteristics (blue/green eyes, straight hair, light skin, etc) in offspring.7

Indigenismo is used primarily to refer to literature, but also refers to the social construct of the “noble Indian,” an indigenous person with a romanticized past. As such, indigenismo has been evoked in Dominican nationalist discourses as a way to erase African history and presence by replacing it with Indigenous, Taíno8 or Spanish identity.

I will be employing these very basic definitions and these two specific sociopolitical contexts (the United States and the Dominican Republic) as the setting and frameworks for my analysis.

Defining Afro-Latina Bodies

Florinda Bryant, a self-defined Black-Mexicana, created a hip-hop theatre piece titled “Half-Breed Southern Fried Check One” that critically engages her lived experience as the daughter of a Mexican/Tejana9 woman and a Black American man. In this piece, she discusses not only the complexity of her lived experience, but the reality of race relations in the South and particularly in Texas.

Written in a hip-hop aesthetic, the protagonist in the piece recalls a memory from childhood, when on the first day of fifth grade, the teacher, Ms. Butler, goes through roll call, and in the process asks for the children’s race.

Ms. Butler: Florinda Bryant? Florinda?

Student 5: Here.

Ms. Butler: Race?

Student 5: Mixed, Black and Mexican.

Ms. Butler: What?

Student 5: I am mixed. My momma is Mexican and my daddy is Black.

Ms. Butler: I see, well we have to report your race. Let’s just put African American.10

This excerpt to me not only highlights the conflicts arising out of “outlaw” unions, such as the marriage of Blacks and Mexicans/Blacks and whites/Blacks and Asians, etc., but also the particular dilemmas faced by Latinas who are of African heritage. On the surface, it is difficult to tell the difference between what the protagonist’s body signifies and what could be defined as her lived experience: her body is a Black Latina body that is simply read as a Black female body in the South. On a deeper level, beyond the surface, what we find is a complex weave of social constructs based on race and nationality. In sitting with the piece, I couldn’t help but wonder how the conversation would be different had the protagonist been born of two Mexican parents, one who was Afro-Mexican and the other who was not. Of course, that would overlook the specific complexity of the protagonist’s story: because of where her body is (Texas), and because of what her body is: a symbol of the union between a Black American, sharecropping, cowboy history and a Mexicana church-going/border crossing/Spanish-speaking herstory.

Later on in the piece, the protagonist enters a moment of self-reflection, almost as if provoked by the constant assumptions thrown onto her physical body:

Whose legs do you have? Whose hands do you have? Whose eyes are those?

I walk like my dad/whose legs do you have? Hold cigarettes just like my daddy/whose hands do you have? eyes like my Aunt Alice/whose eyes do you have? hair like my mom/whose hair do you have? What do you see in the mirror/all over your body. I sound like my sister/whose voice do we have? I sleep like my grandmother/drink like my grandfather/what do you see? When you look at your body. Wide hips/high cheek bones/Not sure who we don’t remember. What do you see written on your body. All this blood with so little truly our own. I walk like my dad, hold a cigarette like my dad with my mom’s hair.

What do you see? What does your body remember?

Florinda Bryant, as the writer, takes the protagonist from a space of contemplating the physical embodiment of heritage to the ephemeral recollection of ancestral memory, ending with “What does your body remember?” while simultaneously touching upon the notion of blood. “All this blood with so little truly our own.” With these two statements, Bryant highlights the rift between expectations and lived experience. What are Afro-Latina bodies supposed to experience? What do we really live? Whose children are we? What do our bodies demonstrate to the world, and what does it remember? Simultaneously, Bryant asks us to consider notions of African and Indigenous ancestral memories and the “one-drop rule” of blood and racial purity.

As Afro-Latinas in the world, we are constantly negotiating others’ assumptions about where our bodies and our memories overlap, where our Blackness/negritud begins and our Latina-ness end. As Afro-Latinas in the United States, we are also negotiating the notion of blood and racial purity in a way that was obscured in most countries under Iberian colonization. In the Latin American context, rather than quantifying race by one drop, Iberian laws connoted gradations of racial categorization based on specific mixtures of blood. This simultaneously obscured negritud and made blackness central to Criollo identity all at once, in that the official number of “negros” decreased, while the number of “mestizos, pardos, mulatos, zambos,” etc. increased. In the United States, with the one-drop rule, whiteness became central to racial identity formation, and polarized people into essential categories. It is this tension between centrality and essentialism that plays out when an Afro-Latina body walks through spaces in the United States.

This space of tension, of lack of clarity, of shifting and re-definition is at once the most painful and one of the most liberating and complex areas of lived experience.

Taking Florinda Bryant’s writing as a cue, and using my own body as the location of analysis, I have laid out some of my responses to some of the questions the protagonist in “Half Breed Southern Fried Check One” asks as a segue into looking at these shadowed areas. These responses serve to complicate the dialogue and demonstrate, en carne viva (in the flesh), the ways in which Afro-Latina identities and bodies transgress essential categorization.

Whose eyes do you have?

I don’t know what my father’s mother looked like, only that she made love with “un moreno” and my father was born a dark, mahogany brown. The implication in the floating whispers is that she herself was not morena, or dark in any way, that she transgressed. She died when my father was young. He was raised by his grandparents and everyone calls him Negrito. This term of endearment both obscures his darkness and brings it to light.

When I was eighteen and visiting my family in Santo Domingo, as I had every year since we left, I said to my light-skinned, light-haired cousin, “My father’s negro, that’s why everyone calls him Negrito.” My cousin said, “No, he’s not. He’s moreno. They call him Negrito because they love him.” I had to insist, “Yes, that’s true. But, he is negro. And that’s not a bad thing.” My cousin shrugged his shoulder and shook his head. He thought I was crazy, insisted I was insulting my father. I thought he was crazy for missing the obvious.

I think I have my father’s mother’s eyes. Nobody else has them. Nobody else is willing to see the beauty of our darkness.

Whose hands do you have?

A Trinidadian friend of mine puts lotion on her hands and kisses each finger after she is done. She insists that it’s important that “our hands not look ashy” and that “You’ve got to love your hands.” When I was younger, white people would tell me, “You have such healing hands.” I would nod, wondering if they were transferring racist implications on dark skin, or if, in truth, I was born to heal. I look down at my brown hands and wonder whose they are. At first glance, they look like no one else’s in my family. They are a rich oak brown, full of lines on big, big palms. They’re callused, no matter how much lotion I put on. I have small fingers, short fingers with curves on the end of them. At second glance, I realize they are my mother’s hands. Mine are brown, hers are white. I don’t know, though, where the healing powers came from: the ability to take away pain by touch or to soothe fear by holding.

Whose hair do you have?

When I was growing up, my Dominican cousins Yadira and Rosanna would spend hours “combing” my hair. Rosanna, violet brown and with a head of tight, kinky hair, would try to pull out as much as she could and Yadira, yellow (my tía says she’s jabao) and with pelo grueso, ie., nappy hair, would try to put back as much as she could. I would be at ...