Being Afro-Latina, it’s difficult to affirm both my identifies

To support student journalism and the content you love, become a member of The Daily Orange today.

The first time I felt like an Afro-Latino, a Latino who is also a descendant of the African diaspora, was when I read Your Lips: Mapping Afro-Boricua Feminist Making 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 desperately tries to prove that she belongs in the family and deserves a place at the kitchen table, a place described as “a place of politics, poetics, kinship, and food.”

The reading affected me deeply; the author was able to give language to an experience that I have suffered throughout my life. I grew up in a traditionally Dominican family. That meant waking up to mangu in the morning, bachata blasting on the loudspeaker and El Sabado Gigante on the TV. I love my culture and I am very proud to call myself Dominican. Despite this, I always felt like I was trying too hard to claim a culture that didn’t give back.

I have felt isolated from my family because of my Blackness several times in my life, but the most acute example of this exclusion occurred when I was 14 years old, traveling to the Dominican Republic with my white mother and aunts. We had all gone to the beach the day before, so we decided to go to a large salon in an upscale part of Santiago. My mother and 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 hairdresser in town. black in the institution. I still remember the way her white colleagues looked at me and offered me a relaxer so I could ‘fix’ my pelo malo (bad hair). My hairdresser told me all about how the salon’s white, wealthy clients preferred stylists to use different brushes for their black clients.

I was being actively discriminated against by my own people and the experience was devastating. After this experience, I felt like the only way I could be truly Dominican was if I maintained an affinity with whiteness at the expense of my black identity. I didn’t feel like there was a way to assert both 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 number, the multicultural community
it is tightly knit.

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

October 15 marked the end of Hispanic and Latino 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 contributes directly to their oppression and erasure of their darkness. We need to expand what it means to be Latino, past the whitewashed versions of our culture that dominate the media. There also needs to be a greater effort made by the university to celebrate intersectional identities, so that students feel like they have the space to affirm all components of their identity at once.

Katrice Ramirez, Class of 2023