Latinx, Afro-Latinx and Hispanic
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
“Hispanic Heritage Month,” started on the 15th of September and runs through Tuesday, October 14th. Many young Latinx are questioning what, and who that name actually represents.
Isabelia Herrera writes:
First, let’s talk about the name. G. Cristina Mora, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American,” said the term Hispanic emerged both as a “fight for recognition” and an “administrative quandary.” After the 1970 census severely undercounted Latinx populations, the Census Bureau developed a Spanish Origin Advisory Committee made up of activists, academics and civic leaders to tackle the problem.
Soon, intense debates about how to address the issue emerged: Should the new label focus on commonality of the Spanish language? Should it center race? A shared experience of colonization? Some argued “Latino” too closely resembled “Latin American,” and preferred to distinguish themselves from a transient immigrant community. Others felt focusing the label on the Spanish language connected them too closely to their European colonizers. To complicate matters, there were generations of folks in New Mexico who embraced the term “Hispano”; these communities cherished both their Spanish and their Apache, Comanche, Pueblo or other Indigenous ancestry. “Even if they had never set foot in Spain,” Mora said, many claimed this part of their heritage as a mechanism to avoid discrimination, particularly during the Jim Crow era.
“Hispanic” was presented as an English-language parallel to the New Mexican term “Hispano,” one that could be reframed into a catchall to include dozens of nationalities, races and identities. “Hispanic became the imperfect compromise,” and eventually became a census category in 1980, Mora said.
Since then, the word Latino (and, more recently, the gender-inclusive term Latinx) has become more widely adopted, calling into question the continued use of Hispanic in the federally observed commemoration. Janel Martinez, a multimedia journalist who started Ain’t I Latina?, an online publication that highlights black Latinas, said she doesn’t refer to the month by its official name at all, instead calling it Latinx Heritage Month. But she says the issue goes deeper than terminology.
“Though these ‘all-inclusive’ terms were designed as umbrella terms to unify and reflect a shared culture, it’s clear not everyone is included,” Martinez said. “Those of us who often exist on the outskirts of the definition, such as black and/or Indigenous Latinxs, we’ve created our own safe spaces to celebrate ourselves during the month and beyond.” Martinez also added that she’d like to see the month include conversations about “how equitable and inclusive spaces are being created to center” the existence of black and Indigenous Latinos and “issues that disproportionately impact us.”
That conversation is echoed in “The Problem With Latinidad: A growing community of young, black, and indigenous people are questioning the very identity underpinning Hispanic Heritage Month,” by Miguel Salazar
Historically, the forging of this ethnic identity has been understood as a necessity in the face of white supremacy and anti-Mexican Juan Crow laws. In response to recent events, it’s been useful for raising awareness of migrant family separations, Washington’s insistence on militarizing borders in Mexico and Central America, and mass shooters warning of a “Hispanic invasion” of the United States. Even so, its most vocal critics, who are often young and black or indigenous, have not minced words in their critique of what they see as an exclusionary identity fabricated by—and for the benefit of—white and mestizo elites and the American political class.
I spoke about the recent rejection of Latinidad with the journalists, organizers, and thinkers at the forefront of this conversation. We talked about what determines who is allowed to claim the term, what purpose it serves, and whether the identity is useful as a category anymore.
I was thinking about this today — after spending yesterday evening on the State University of New York’s Binghamton campus, where I was a guest speaker for the Latin American Student Union (LASU) “
Latinx Heritage Month Kick Off”
The students who invited me were well aware that I am
not Latinx/Hispanic. They issued the invite because
The Young Lords Party, of which I was a member, was the first mainland radical Puerto Rican organization to address and confront issues of race, and colorism within the Puerto Rican community and the broader Spanish-speaking Caribbean diaspora, and because I developed and taught a course for many years, “Women in the Caribbean” at SUNY New Paltz, which covered these issues.
While many older people may think of the late great Afro-Cuban singer
Celia Cruz, when a discussion comes up about Afro-Latinas, today’s symbol in the entertainment world is Dominican-American singer and actress Diana de los Santos.
“Love & Hip Hop” regular Amara La Negra is no stranger to the side glances and microaggressions that come with having dark skin. The singer, entertainer and Afro-Latina is proud of her heritage — that is, except for the racism that’s still present within the Latinx community. A deep-rooted history of colorism and slavery contributed to a culture in which Latinx people are still discriminated against by members of their own community, even as they are made up of many different colors, shapes and sizes.
“Growing up, my mom used to always tell me that, because of the color of my skin, I would always have to work twice as hard to be recognized for my work,” Amara told HuffPost in an interview. “It wasn’t until I got older that I realized and understood what she meant by it.”
The singer’s mother is from the Dominican Republic and immigrated through the Mexican border to the United States in search of a better life. Inspired by the journey her mother took to get here, Amara, born Diana Danelys De Los Santos, has spent her career fighting for Black and Latinx representation.
“Here’s a classic one — people consider me to be physically attractive, and I get the, ‘Oh my god, you’re a pretty Black girl,’ or ‘For being Black, you’re really pretty,’” Amara said. “I went to do an audition for a soap opera, and they told me, ‘You’re probably not going to get the role because they want someone who looks more Latina.’”
“La Negra” from her stage name translates to “the Black one,” which is how she said people referred to her during her time in the girl group Amara when they didn’t remember her name. She uses that distinction as her stage name to celebrate her Blackness.
She discussed this last year with NPR
Amara remembers dealing with racism and colorism in entertainment since pre-school. At 4, she won a competition that landed her on the the wildly-successful Hispanic variety show, Sábado Gigante. For the six years she was on the show, Amara says she was the only dark-skinned child in the cast and that producers would always place her either way in the back of the stage or smack in the middle "like a bug in the middle of a cup of milk."The comments about Amara's appearance from people working on the show were constant. Amara's mother was often told her daughter's hair was unmanageable and needed to be permed.
"And I remember her looking at me and her face ... it was just letting me know that this was the beginning of the struggle," Amara says.
After years of straightening perms, hot combs, and dieting Amara decided she was done policing her body. So she took the stage name Amara La Negra, "love the black woman," and embraced her afro.
There were other reminders about who “National Hispanic Heritage” leaves out.
This Op-Ed from By Melania-Luisa Marte expresses her strong thoughts on the subject.
Despite the fact that dictionaries regularly add terms that we use colloquially – zoodles, hangry and TL;DR to name a few – we still do not have the term Afro-Latinx in the dictionary. For about a year, I have petitioned for the inclusion of this very important and necessary term to several dictionaries.
I first came to the realization of this oversight when doing research on a poem about Afro-Latinidad, which I hoped would educate folks on the meaning behind the term. Instead, I was saddened to learn that dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster and Dictionary.com, do not officially recognize the word.
While the term Latina is a recognized term in most major dictionaries, this is not enough for Afro-Latinxs. It doesn’t do enough to encompass a large group of people who are at the intersection of two identities. When I say I am Afro-Latina, I am saying I am a Black woman with roots in Latin America and Africa. I began embracing the term Afro-Latina about five years ago when there was little conversation around Afro-Latinidad in mainstream media. Through social media, there were many of us creating spaces and using our platforms to celebrate our stories and our culture.
Latinidad has a history of being anti-Black and rewriting history to diminish the impacts colonialism, slavery and white supremacy have had in Latin America. Many of this stems from economic and political inequalities that have left white Latinxs with more power than Black and Indigenous Latinxs. It is important to understand that although many folks interchange race with ethnicity, Latino/a/x is not a race. Latinxs can be white, Black, Asian or Indigenous. Because of this, it’s important to center those who are not equally represented in media.
Not only are we always left to hyphenate to fit within the margins of a term that does not celebrate us, but we are also reduced to screaming into an empty room about the ways in which Latinidad is complicit in our erasure.
Last years article in The Root, by Roberto Carlos Garcia deserves a re-read if you haven’t seen it. It is both critical and supportive.
Congratulations, mi negra! It finally happened. Today you looked into the mirror and said, “I’m black. Soy negra. Vaya.” You embraced your black or brown skin, your curls and kink. No small feat for a Dominican. You’re ready to forgo the centuries of Dominican anti-Africanism and embrace your brothers, sisters and cousins of the African Diaspora.
The reality is, there is no “black coming-out party.” Soon it will begin to sink in that everything black, everything African Diaspora, is appropriated, commercialized, monetized and exploited. Arguably, the term “Afro-Latinx” is suffering from “gimmification.” Within our community, there are Afro-Latinx who pretend black when it is convenient and then try to blend right back into anti-blackness when it is not. The colonial trauma and legacy of self-hate continues to morph into stranger things.
Thankfully, many Afro-Latinx are sharing their stories. Read this excerpt from Yesenia Montilla’s poem “The Day I Realized We Were Black,” from her collection The Pink Box:
because my godparents were Irish-American
because I had suppressed my blackness
because my brother shook me when I told him he was stupid we were Latino
because he had missed his Jersey to Port Authority bus
because he was walking to the nearest train station and lost his way
because he was stopped by the police
because he was hit with a stick
because he was never given the right directions even though he begged
because trash was thrown at him from the police cruiser’s window as he walked
because he was never the same
because we’re black because we’re black and I never knew I was twenty-two
I’m looking forward to where this will lead in the future. Just as “Negro History Week” evolved into “Black History Month”, perhaps the term “Hispanic” will be retired.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In a new book, Corey Robin attempts to explain the life and complicated views of a Supreme Court justice whose decisions have profoundly shaped our world. Vanity Fair: Is the Story of Clarence Thomas an American Tragedy?
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As a member of our highest court, Justice Clarence Thomas has outsized impact on American life. But because of his position, he is also isolated from the type of questioning and criticism we might otherwise give to a political figure. Famously almost never speaking in oral arguments, his role on the court is more difficult for outsiders to understand. Since the hearings where Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment in 1991, he has been leery of the press.
In his new book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, Corey Robin, author and professor of political science at CUNY, attempts to fill in some of the blanks. “Part of the puzzle is that somebody who seems so strange and alien, yet is right there at the center of it all. We don’t see it,” he said in a recent interview. When Robin sat down to read the opinions that Thomas has produced in his nearly quarter century on the court, he realized that there was a story that other writers hadn’t told. Thomas writes about race at length, and a fair amount of information about what he really thinks about black America is contained in his opinions—especially his epic, long-winded dissents. Robin also documents Thomas’s political conversion. In the late 1960s, he was a black radical, believing in separatism and nationalism; a little over a decade later, he was a free-market conservative.
Robin argues that many of Thomas’s decisions show deep uncertainty and inconsistency on the role the government should play in the lives of black Americans, but fundamentally coalesce around the idea that racism can’t be overcome. In some sense, Robin’s book also works as a critique of the incredible power vested in the court and warns the left that it will be a real impediment for decades to come. “Most people in my generation grew up in the shadow of this halo around the institution, which from a historical point of view, is quite idiosyncratic,” he said. “That is not the way the institution has been understood.”
Vanity Fair: How did you decide you wanted to write about Thomas at length?
Corey Robin: I got into this by accident. I was asked to write an article for an anthology on African American political thought. I’d written about conservatism before and I really felt like I was done with it, but the editors persuaded me. Instantly, as I started researching Thomas—about whom I knew next to nothing—I was so struck by the resonance of his story: racial pessimism, this deep immersion in black nationalism, and so on.
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The two most ruthless domestic slave traders in America had a secret language for their business.
Slave trading was a “game.” The men, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, were daring “pirates” or “one-eyed men,” a euphemism for their penises. The women they bought and sold were “fancy maids,” a term signifying youth, beauty and potential for sexual exploitation — by buyers or the traders themselves.
Rapes happened often.
“To my certain knowledge she has been used & that smartly by a one eyed man about my size and age, excuse my foolishness,” Isaac Franklin’s nephew James — an employee and his uncle’s protege — wrote in typical business correspondence, referring to Caroline Brown, an enslaved woman who suffered repeated rape and abuse at James’s hands for five months. She was 18 at the time and just over five feet tall.
Franklin and Armfield, who headquartered their slave trading business in a townhouse that still stands in Alexandria, Va., sold more enslaved people, separated more families and made more money from the trade than almost anyone else in America. Between the 1820s and 1830s, the two men reigned as the “undisputed tycoons” of the domestic slave trade, as Smithsonian Magazine put it.
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Candace Owens Defends MAGA in a Room Full of Black People and It Ends Exactly How You Expect It Would. The Root: Make America Hate Again
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The slogan “Make America Great Again” infamously became popularized in 2016 as a rallying cry for conservatives, white supremacists, and other sycophants and deplorables before eventually propelling Donald John Trump—a woefully underqualified xenophobe accused of everything from collusion to fraud to multiple instances of sexual misconduct—into the White House. The phrase has been particularly triggering for black folks since Ronald Reagan coined it in 1980, because when the hell was America ever great for our black asses?
On Saturday, during the Revolt Summit in Atlanta, the slogan was discussed during a panel featuring entertainers and activists such as Killer Mike and T.I., as well as Her Ashiness herself, Candace “Auntie Ruckus” Owens.
The fireworks began when moderator Jeff Johnson explained how Trump’s rhetoric has fueled our contentious climate, which Raggedy Ann predictably refuted.
“That’s a fallacy,” she exclaimed. “When did Trump ever say, ‘Black people are the problem?’”
“Make America great again!” Johnson replied. “That’s when he said it.”
From there, it all went predictably downhill, as T.I. took the opportunity to jump down her throat.
“When you say ‘Make America Great Again,’ which period are we talking about?” he asked. “The period where women couldn’t vote? The period we were hanging from trees? The crack era? Which period in America are you trying to make America like again?”
Owens then proceeded to bullshit her way through her desire to make black America great again, before revealing that America was one of the first countries to free our ancestors—which is news to me, considering it was actually one of the last.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA - SEPTEMBER 14: T.I., Candace Owens, Steven Pargett, and Jeff Johnson speak onstage during day 3 of REVOLT Summit x AT&T Summit on September 14, 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Photo: Moses Robinson (Getty Images for Revolt)
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Country Music’s force is in its thousands of pictures and clips and details, but narratively it serves up only a slightly more thoughtful retread of the standard Nashville party line: that country musicians and fans are like one big family—and yet country is also open to everyone, and it’s regrettable if anyone ever gave you a contrary impression. That country music comes from the working people and is ultimately about simple sincere storytelling, or in songwriter Harlan Howard’s well-worn phrase, “three chords and the truth” (“even,” adds Rodney Crowell, “when it’s a big fat lie”). Unless it’s about making bank: Half the yarns here feature artists being nearly laughed out of Nashville till they land a hit and everyone is their oldest, bestest friend. They’ll allow that occasionally the music drifts too far in one direction or another, but it always cycles back around. And that it’s strictly apolitical, except that sometimes it bravely raises ground-level social issues you won’t hear anywhere else, and well, yes, sometimes a producer or exec or artist is “opinionated” (read “a raging bigot”), but that shakes out over time.
These refrains are all accurate in some way. What they leave unstated is that country music has a terrible image problem, caricatured as corny backward music for rubes and rednecks and racists. As a result, Nashville is reflexively on the defensive, caught between earned resentment of the class and regional biases those charges represent and the reality that a portion of country fandom—especially in the former Confederacy—likes the idea that it’s for rubes and rednecks and maybe even racists (or “accidental racists,” at least). Except in rare moments, Burns boot-scoots around that particular rat’s nest.
It’s rightly foundational to the series that country, like any other major American music, is born of the “rub” between black and white cultures, not to mention Mexican and Eastern European sounds, among others. Country, as Ketch Secor of the revivalist band Old Crow Medicine Show puts it, is the music that follows “the path of the fiddle and the banjo,” the European violin encountering the twangy African import. It’s Scots-Irish balladry mixing with the blues, and black gospel intermingling with white gospel, and Virginia meeting Texas meeting the Mississippi Delta and Hollywood cowboys (plus the occasional Jewish songwriter or Hollywood cowboy). Black and white string bands in the early 20th century played a lot of the same repertoire, and it was partly pure marketing that fostered the segregation between “hillbilly” and “race” music, the early recording industry’s terms for country and blues. But Burns feels compelled to stress that connectedness and downplay the persistence of that separation.
The relation between country and the banjo-pickin’ heritage of blackfaced minstrelsy is acknowledged but soft-pedaled. Burns dealt with minstrel shows for a few minutes more in the first episode of Jazz, but the subject should be more significant here, given that country founders such as Emmett Miller blacked up. Burns dwells on the fact that pioneers such as A. P. and Mother Maybelle Carter (the latter finally getting her due as a guitar hero), Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and others all had back-home black musical influences and mentors. But none of those associates shared in the stars’ fame and fortune or were otherwise credited for their contributions by country listeners. Burns takes note of the historic occasion in 1930 when Rodgers and a young Louis Armstrong recorded together—which Johnny Cash and Armstrong stirringly revisited four decades later on Cash’s frequently boundary-defying network TV show. Such moments make for great doc footage. They’re also rarities in the music’s mainstream history.
Charley Pride, Johnny Cash, and Dwight Yoakam
Photo illustration by Slate Photos by Craig Mellish, Jared Ames, and PBS.
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After reports of xenophobic attacks against foreign business owners emerged, many Nigerian citizens have fled South Africa in the wake of all the tension.
Early this month, riots in the country targeted several Johannesburg businesses owned by foreigners. According to CNN, Nigerian native Dennis Benson the saw signs that he was in danger as a foreign business owner, days before he decided to flee South Africa.
“I packed my bags and went to stay with a Nigerian friend who lives close to the airport because I knew it was going to get bloody. I have seen other protests,” Benson said. “A supermarket owned by an Ethiopian beside my apartment was looted and destroyed. The rioters even took the fridge with drinks. They were chanting that people should go back to their country.”
Unfortunately, the violence turned deadly, and lead to the fatalities of 10 people, which included two foreigners. CNNreported, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari sent a delegation to South Africa to assess the situation and later announced plans to repatriate 640 citizens from the country. A private airline operator, Air Peace, offered to provide two flights for Nigerians that wanted to return to Nigeria and the first group of 187 rejoiced in their arrival at a Lagos airport on Wednesday. There are plans to evacuate more in the coming weeks as many have been stranded in South Africa due to trouble with paperwork and documentation.
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Industrialisation, up close, is organised monotony. For eight hours a day workers at a cashew factory in northern Mozambique scoop nuts from their oily shells. It is hard to talk above the thrum of machines. The pay is a modest 4,600 meticais ($76) a month. But it is a job. There are precious few good ones in Mozambique.
African countries are trying to climb the industrial ladder, and the processing of agricultural commodities seems a natural first step. By roasting coffee and spinning cotton they hope to boost export earnings and create jobs. For example, a fifth of the retail price of cashews goes to primary processors (see chart). By reviving its industry, Mozambique has captured some of that value. But its story also shows why industrial policy is hard to get right.
In the 1960s Mozambique produced half the world’s raw cashew nuts and processed much of the crop domestically. Then the industry was brought to its knees by a long civil war. The knockout punch came in the 1990s, when the World Bank told the government to remove controls and cut taxes on the export of raw nuts. Trading firms shipped out cashews and processed them elsewhere. Domestic processors shut down and 8,000 jobs were lost. Mozambique’s cashew industry became a cause célèbre for anti-globalisation activists.
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