afro-latino

U Black, Maybe [AfroLatino, Part Two]

by Jose Vilson on September 19, 2011

Mario Morales, AfroLatino

When we talk about black maybe
We talk about situations
Of people of color and because you are that color
You endure obstacles and opposition
And not all the time from … from other nationalities
Sometimes it comes from your own kind
Or maybe even your own mind
You get judged … you get laughed at…you get looked at wrong
You get sighted for not being strong
The struggle of just being you
The struggle of just being us…black maybe

- Common, “U Black, Maybe”

There’s something about being AfroLatino that people don’t quite understand. There’s an understanding of seeing race and culture as these malleable things that far too many people can’t always comprehend. Self-identity as a process complicates relationships, because whenever you think you have yourself figured out, others’ perceptions of you interfere with the mold you’ve already decided for yourself. They probe, poke, talk, whisper, yell, ask too many damn questions, and you’re asked to answer them as if you’re the representative of everyone in this self-identifying category. In general, people compromise on the intersection of race as a perception of self and a perception of someone else.

That’s why AfroLatinos get aggravated the most. People who consider themselves of one definite race never understand the emphasis of such a title. Many White people think it’s an intimidating title assuring the dominant culture that they won’t conform to their simplistic racial structures. Whether the reason they’re intimidated is because of the Afro or Latino remains to be seen. Many Black people, on the other hand, see the term AfroLatino as a way for people from Latin America to ostracize if not banish their African roots in favor of the Spaniard colonizers’ blood. Of course, I question whether people never noticed that the title “AfroLatino” puts Black first, and “Latino” isn’t the same as Spanish.

But it seems that, for many, speaking Spanish and being Spanish are exactly the same thing.

As we speak, people question whether such a title dilutes or disbands people of color in certain struggles for equity. To that end, I have four things to say. First, AfroLatino for almost everyone I know almost always means an inclusion and understanding of all the parts they represent and the histories that come with our origins. Secondly, we usually do this against the wishes and nudges of our last generation’s countries of origin (i.e. Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil), accentuating our Blackness as we grow. Third, we as a whole have to do better in finding characteristics of our race and culture without highlighting the negatives exclusively, because we’re allowed to smile against those odds and should continue to do so.

Fourth, one of the greatest African-American cultural researchers and scholars happened to be an AfroLatino: Arturo Schomburg. Not ironically, the public library and museum named after him are a few blocks away from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and on Malcolm X Boulevard right in the middle of USA’s original Black Mecca: Harlem. During his time on this Earth, people of his own kind belittled the contributions he made to the cultural movement, but now people recognize what he’s done not just for people of color in this country, for an entire nation.

Afro-Latino is a term of unity, an umbrella under which we invite people to contribute the best of their culture and progress past the titles set for us under rules we didn’t create but perpetuate. I can be Latino and Black at the same time, because my contributions to both cultures may not be enumerated or listed.

It’s tough enough just being ourselves when people want us to conform to their order. While people may point to outside factors for their own identification, I assure you my revolution is much more personal.

Mr. Vilson, who will have more to say by mañana …

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Living Quisqueya

by Jose Vilson on April 19, 2011


This past weekend, I spent some time with my Dominican parents. To be specific, my Dominican mother and stepfather, both of whom enjoy the Dominican satellite channels offered on Time Warner Cable. They’ll watch shows rooted in guttural comedy, scantily-clad voluptuous women, and nationalism sprinkled throughout the programming. They laugh, shake, dance, and yell at the television, even when the situation doesn’t call for it. My parents respond to the automatic trigger of the palm trees, the beige dust rising after Passats sweep by the rocks of the highways. I’m shaken by images of lighter complexions featured within the studios and darker hues outside of the studio.

Even from far away, their perceptions about Blackness get reinforced by the TV they want to see.

It was only a few years ago that I got my mom to admit her own Blackness. While I don’t believe all Latinos are Black, I find it disingenuous for one of the first colonies in the Western Hemisphere to deny any parts of their Blackness. Much of this was engrained into them by the founders of the national identity, who wanted no part of anything remotely Haitian. It’s as if the duel between Dominican Republic’s founders and Haiti’s founders lies in who wanted to appease their former oppressors. While Haiti celebrates its independence from a European country, Dominican Republic celebrates its independence from its own neighbor. This belief is so prevalent still that even a literal seismic shift in the form of an earthquake couldn’t mend the fences between these two countries.

But I’ve grown weary of trying to tell others that Haitians and Dominicans practically listen to the same music, eat the same foods, and appreciate the same weather. Our flag colors are the same, and many of our traditions descend right from the continent of Africa. I’ve been stuck in between these arguments where people who refuse to accept the others’ side of things, wondering when a people so similar will actually come together and take advantage of the plentiful resources of their own island.

I’m also tired of the lack of responsibility countries like The United States, France, and Spain have played in perpetuating the frictions and tensions in this relationship. While I admit that I don’t know much Kreyol nor have I been to Haiti, I consider myself every bit as Haitian as the next Haitian.

Thus, I commend Henry Louis Gates for the exposure and care he took to document these experience in the first installment of Black in Latin America on PBS. I just wish I knew what to do with all this information. Besides be myself.

Jose, who is black, no maybe …

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Word To The Wise: Make The Words Count

by Jose Vilson on March 15, 2011

Felipe Luciano at Capicu

Felipe Luciano At Capicu

The night before my engagement, I had the pleasure of attending Capicu’s Anniversary Show featuring the legendary Felipe Luciano. Anyone who’s read this blog for longer than a few months know how much I admire the former first Chairman of the Young Lords Party and member of the select Last Poets. He was probably my first Afro-Latino influence and the first speech he gave to the captive audience at Syracuse University ten years ago still resonates with me to this day. Today, he still finds wedges of time in his schedule to come down and speak to a youth sorely in need of his wisdom.

For the better part of an hour, he interspersed his rooted poetry with ghetto homilies, speaking clearly to the captive audience hoping to understand. Frankly, Felipe is an aberration of sorts, if only because of how effective a speaker he is, rarely needing to tell others his emotions in order to emote. He rarely laughed at his own jokes and kept his composure during his most exasperating pieces. Every word he spoke felt important, and yet, it was how he felt like he was listening that made the most sense.

What most of us don’t get about talking in general is not just about how much you say; it’s mainly about what you say. The best conversationalists I know learn to balance what they say with what the other person is saying, even when they’re in complete disagreement. They don’t squash conversation by pushing their point across and talk until they’ve exhausted all the possible thoughts around the subject; they literally play it by ear. The best writers write with a sequence of events that arise from a logic that makes people believe they’re listening to every thought you thought you were thinking throughout the essay.

People who read my 1,000-word articles here assume I’m really talkative in person. Quite the contrary, in group settings, I seldom talk unless absolutely prompted. I listen a lot (sometimes, more than I should). But the same way I listen, I’m also scribbling mental notes, getting a feel for the person(s) in front of me, trying to understand where they’re coming from, even if I completely disagree with them. Once I speak, then, I’m hoping to make the best point possible, even if it’s just a quick joke or accentuating someone else’s point.

We always say “It’s the things we don’t say that mean more than what we do say.” We can use that to our advantage to learn more, see more, be more.

 

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My Race: Defining The Undefinable

by Jose Vilson on December 6, 2010

Dominican Republic and Haiti from Space

For those that haven’t pieced it together from the plethora of race essays I’ve written here and elsewhere, I self-identify racially as a Black Latino. I’ve found it’s probably the most appropriate title for this idiosyncratic, deeply political experience I carry. It was probably what I might call the difference between compromising my understanding of race in this country and the world without compromising myself. I understand the skin I’m in limits what others might consider me in their eugenics charts, but my experience growing up around all types of brown hues in my family and all of them “Dominican” leads me to believe I don’t fully have the Black experience here in the States.

Whenever I get that deep with people, I get responses that might be original to them, but typical of what we surmise about what I identify as. Frankly, I don’t even have a definitive answer, because no one’s ever been able to explicitly define what Black, Asian, or any of that means in a way that takes into the history prior to 1492, or whenever we believe The Conquerer arrived at the Western Hemisphere. Let’s look at some situations and I’ll tell you what I may be:

1) Around my Dominican family, I’m Dominican. I dance merengue, speak a modified Spanish, and eat rice and beans with some major meat (chicken, beef, or pork, in that order). Unless …

2) I’m in Dominican Republic. Then, I’m obviously not full Dominican. I’m either gringo, Dominican-American, or Dominican-American-Haitian, or something that’s not pure Dominican. So I walk around like a tainted paint bucket.

3) Around my Haitian family, I’m … Dominican with a bit of Haitian. I respect that. I qualify for only two out of three of the major culture points. I dance zouk and eat the food (which is very similar to Dominican food, by the way), but I can’t speak a lick of Creole besides Sak Pase, and unfortunately, that phrase has become … passe.

4) Around my African-American friends, I’m Black. For the most part. I can identify with the struggle, and when there’s a discussion about Blackness, I can speak up without fear. That is, of course, unless some people in the African American community start discussing things or people I had no idea about until pre-college, like The Color Purple, Nina Simone, Prince, Zane, soul food, Toni Morrison, the electric slide, or anything that belongs in the pantheon of the African-American experience. It’s not that I didn’t want to learn about these ideas; the minute I got access to Carter G. Woodson and Maya Angelou, I inhaled the stuff. Before college, I wasn’t learning about anyone’s history but the predominant American history.

5) Around my White friends, I find myself having to do a lot of balancing. Even when I don’t realize it, I assure them of my identity while leaving enough of a connection open enough to let them in. If they let me listen to my Talib Kweli, I’ll turn around and play Kings of Leon. I’ll switch between rum-and-cokes to Blue Moons with them. I’ll make the commercial joke, but make the statement concerning diversity and equity that no one in the room’s considered. I don’t need to make anyone feel like they have to go out of their way to be something they’re not (insert White guilt here), but I find ways to meet people halfway.

6) Around my Asian friends, my Mexican friends, or any other friends who I haven’t mentioned, I’m just Jose. People bring their own thoughts and prejudices to the table, so I counterbalance with whatever I feel is appropriate. One time, in the midst of company from work, one Indian man decided to make an offensive and not well-executed Black joke in my direction, thinking I’d find it funny. Instead, I just said, “Well, that was appropriate.” It shut him down for the next three years with anyone who wasn’t doing business with him.

Seeing my Black-Asian godson grow every day via Facebook (and whenever I get the chance to visit him), I see how much easier it will probably be for him to understand the world around him. Unlike me, he has people around him who know how to help him come into his own cultural and racial being. I think anyone who fully feels the pull of two races inevitably goes through the phases of denial, anger, rage, settling, blending, and eventually, enlightenment.

I understand it’s a social construct, but it doesn’t make it any less real. It’s inextricably tied to the culture here. I don’t know how to define Black or Latino for anyone, but I know the things I’ve felt and done in my lifetime fit best with these titles. I’m still a writer, a thinker, a lover, a friend, a brother, a son, a poet, a speaker, a teacher, a man to someone out there. It’s these experiences that affect the rest of those titles, and how I approach them.

I could simply call myself human as well, but I … I haven’t settled that one, either.

Jose, unedited for the masses …

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Book Giveaway June 2010: Hija De Mi Madre by Carmen Mojica Fabian

May 26, 2010 Book Giveaway

Welcome back to my monthly book giveaway! < insert applause here > One of two books I’m giving away is Carmen Mojica Fabian’s Hija De Mi Madre, a poetry chapbook I’ll soon have on my bookshelf and I suggest others get that as well. I can tell you more about the book, but I’ll let [...]

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Black History Month: The Importance of Arturo Schomburg and Why I’m So Steadfast on Quisqueya

February 26, 2010 Jose

A few weeks ago, a few people asked me why I helped create the now annual event Quisqueya, a celebration of Afro-Latino history throughout the Americas at Syracuse University. Honestly, it had a tinge of selfishness: by then, I helped run a series of workshops dedicated to understanding the relationships between Blacks and Latinos at [...]

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Short Notes: Day and Age (and My Radio Show Appearance)

November 15, 2009 Short Notes

A few links: Long overdue shout-out to the latest edition of Education Carnival courtesy of I’m A Dreamer. [ImADreamer] Mom101′s response to the LA Times’ article about mommy bloggers is the best I’ve ever read regarding blogger relationships with marketers. [Mom101] Want a really cool poster to use in class detailing the difference between Left [...]

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The Tourist (or Not That Black in America)

July 27, 2009 Jose

Sure enough, I didn’t catch most of CNN’s Black in America 2 special. I’ll most likely catch that sometime in the future; reruns prevail over original programming even on a 24-hour news channel. I caught bits of it and found inspiration in the story of Steve Perry, a Black high school principal whose high expectations [...]

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Me Sube La Bilirrubina (It Raises My Bilirubin)

July 25, 2008 Jose

I’m honestly not that arrogant. I just like to call madness out for what it is. Eddie Griffin might be right: I’m insane, and that’s something to be congratulated. Watching Black in America over the last 2 days, at the encouragement ad nauseum of practically everyone in my Facebook, Twitter, etc., I’ve been somewhat reintroduced [...]

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Protecting Our Children From What?

March 4, 2008 Jose

On Friday, our grade / floor celebrated Dominican Independence Day / Black History Month, through a series of performances, from song and dance to Powerpoint slides and poetry (including yours truly.) I wasn’t bothered at all by the performances or even the more pro-Dominican stance the school usually takes. It’s ingrained nationalism, and perpetuated by [...]

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