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The first time I felt seen as an Afro-Latina, a Latino who is also descendant of the African diaspora, was when I read Your Lips: Mapping Afro-Boricua Feminist Becomings by Yomaira Figueroa. The reading, required for my Latina Feminist Theory course, included a story about a little girl who was often isolated from her family because of her Blackness, literally and figuratively. Throughout the story, she tries desperately to prove that she belongs in the family and deserves a spot at the kitchen table, a place that’s described as “a place of politics, poetics, kinship and sustenance.”

The reading affected me profoundly; the author was able to give language to an experience I’ve struggled with my entire life. I was raised in a traditionally Dominican household. That meant waking up to mangu in the morning, bachata blasting on the speaker and El Sabado Gigante on the TV. I love my culture and am so proud to be able to call myself Dominican. Despite this, I always felt like I was trying too hard to claim a culture that didn’t claim me back.

I’ve felt isolated from my family due to my Blackness several times throughout my life but the most poignant example of this exclusion occurred when I was 14 years old, traveling to the Dominican Republic with my white-passing mother and my aunts. We had all gone to the beach the day before, so we decided to go to a big salon in an upscale part of Santiago. My mom and my aunts were all assigned a stylist before I was, so they weren’t there to witness the humiliation I felt when I was escorted to a smaller salon next door and assigned to the only Black hairstylist in the establishment. I can still remember the way her white coworkers looked at me and offered me a relaxer so that I could ‘fix’ my pelo malo (bad hair). My hairstylist told me all about the way that the white, wealthy patrons of the salon preferred that stylists used different brushes on their Black clients.

I was actively being discriminated against by my own people and the experience was devastating. After this experience, I felt as though the only way I could truly be Dominican was if I maintained proximity to whiteness at the expense of my Black identity. It didn’t seem as though there was a way for me to affirm both of my identities as Black and Latina.

Throughout my time at SU, I have not felt the pressure to choose between the Black and Latinx communities on campus. I believe that despite our small numbers, the multicultural community is tight knit.

Unfortunately, my experiences with anti-Blackness in Latinx culture are not unique. Being an Afro-Latina in America is a privilege because I have access to resources and education that are rarely afforded to African descendants in Latin America. There is a long history of anti-Blackness in Latin America that disproportionately impacts the livelihoods of those identifying as Afro-Latina. According to The Project of Race and Ethnicity in Latin America at Princeton University, 130 million people out of 550 million identify as Afro-descendants in Latin America. Even though they make up a large portion of the Latinx population, Afro-descendants are still 2.5 times more likely to be chronically poor and twice as likely to live in slums than their non-Afro-descendant counterparts.

October 15th marked the end of Hispanic and Latinx Heritage month in America and I find myself disappointed by the lack of Afro-Latinx representation in SU’s celebrations. Any celebration of Latinidad is incomplete without Afro-Latinx voices as this exclusion directly contributes to their oppression and erasure of their blackness. We must expand what it means to be Latinx past the whitewashed versions of our culture that dominate the media. There must also be a greater effort made by the university to celebrate intersectional identities so that students can feel like they have the space to affirm all the components of their identities at once.

Katrice Ramirez, Class of 2023

Published on October 23, 2022 at 9:49 pm