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Soy Americana. Soy Latina. Soy Negra.​: Afrodominican

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Soy Americana. Soy Latina. Soy Negra.​: Afrodominican SOY AMERICANA. SOY LATINA. SOY NEGRA.: AFRO- DOMINICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY IN THE U.S. Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors CRUZ, DOMINIQUE CRISTIANA Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 27/09/2021 14:06:52 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/612818 SOY AMERICANA. SOY LATINA. SOY NEGRA.: ​ AFRO­DOMINICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY IN THE U.S. By DOMINIQUE CRISTIANA CRUZ ____________________ A Thesis Submitted to the Honors College In Partial Fulfillment of the Bachelors degree With Honors in Latin American Studies THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA M A Y 2 0 1 6 Approved by: ______________________ Dr. Anne Garland Mahler Department of Spanish and Portuguese Cruz 1 Abstract Latinidad, or the idea of a shared solidarity among Latinxs of all ethnicities in the United States, is as diverse in reality as it is homogenized in mainstream culture. Under the wave of a fairly unidimensional representation of Latinxs lies a vibrant undercurrent of literature and media created by Afro­Latinx scholars. “Afro­Latinx”1 works to challenge the hegemony of ​ Latinidad as a direct acknowledgment of the African diaspora and blackness. Even within the plethora of textual production on Afro­Latinxs, there are gaps. Specifically, there appears to be a gap of stories of second and third generation Afro­Latinxs who have always lived in the United States and grew up in largely white suburban areas. In an effort to address this gap, I will provide a history of race relations in the Dominican Republic to put my personal positioning in context and celebrate my first chance in academia to learn about my culture, as well as include my own personal narratives of interactions with race as a Dominican American in the United States. Within this thesis, I will challenge the completely unnecessary feeling of dueling I have felt between being black and Latina and explore why blackness and Latinidad should not be mutually exclusive. Introduction Latino. Hispanic. Nonwhite Hispanic. Nonblack Hispanic. Black/African American. White/Caucasian. Other. These ethnicities/races are the options that are available for Dominican Americans to choose from on surveys, the national census2 and job applications. These options validate the notion that being Latinx and being black are mutually exclusive. 1 The x symbol in Latinx aims to be gender inclusive and disregard the male/female binary. 2 See Jane H. Hill’s “The Persistence of White Racism” in her book The everyday language of white racism for a ​ ​ summary of the changes made in the 1990 and 2000 census and the advances and continued pitfalls the racial categories present for black Latinxs in accurately identifying themselves. Cruz 2 The lack of diversity in these options shows the perpetual misunderstanding and whitewashing of Dominican American culture. These options do not allow room for a recognition of African descendancy and when one does want to acknowledge this part of her identity, she is forced to choose “Other,” a term too often associated with “less than”. The tendency towards an elision of African roots within Dominican identity has only been further complicated for Dominican Americans when confronted with U.S. racial discourse that continually deems blackness as inferior. Both of these political and social dialogues have an effect on how Dominican Americans choose to identify themselves. Whereas in Dominican history, African descendancy has been largely erased from public discourse, U.S. history and the current status quo also fail to provide a space for articulating the possibility of black and Latinx identities coinciding. This creates a double­bind for Dominican Americans who want to acknowledge the multi­faceted cloth of their ethnic identity both within the Dominican Republic and the United States. The entrenchment of negritude denial is a product of a series of historical traumas that continue to affect the way Dominican Americans consciously, and possibly more importantly, unconsciously experience the world around them. From the want and need for a more accurate racial descriptor that does not ignore a significant part of Latinxs with African ancestry, the term Afro­Latinx was born. As several Latin American countries have a plethora of races and ethnicities represented, this term is broad and applicable for many different groups of Latinxs in the United States. In addition to countering the homogenous space Latinxs are given in United States and Latin American mass media outlets (as lighter skinned with straight or wavy hair and more European­esque Cruz 3 facial features), Afro­Latinx has grown to mean an active acceptance of African heritage and, simultaneously, a vehement refusal of racism within various U.S.­Latinx cultures, encompassing national discourses and mainstream dominant cultures in both the U.S. and Latin America. Though this term is still garnering acceptance from the general population, more and more Latinxs in the United States of all nationalities are proudly and consciously adopting the “afro­” prefix, self­affirming their existence and demanding a unique space for their identity in the vague space demarcated by the term “Latinx”. Additionally, in general, Afro­Latinx intellectuals have utilized this term to recognize a shared history of African descendancy as well as similarities in experiences among Afro­Latinxs in the United States.3 Academic and creative works have documented this phenomenon and its implications on Latinxs’ sense of identity and their journey to self­awareness and self­acceptance as they forge paths in the United States with some interaction with their ancestors’ homelands. From this growth in literature in recent years geared to the Afro­Latinx experience, readers have been offered literary work that generally falls into the category of coming of age stories of Afro­Latinx teens who are born abroad and move between there and an inner city location (more often than not a borough in New York City) and academic texts that analyze the diversity of Afro­Latinx experiences. These literary texts generally feature teens who suffers an identity crisis (that is only amplified by the disconnect between them and their parents and/or peer group) and who attempts to navigate what it means to be Latinx in the United States where their features are not considered to be Latinx to the general public. Some work is set in the 1960s, directly analyzing the aftermath of Jim Crow laws and the interaction 3 See The Afro­Latin@ Reader (edited by Miriam Jimenez Roman and Juan Flores) for a broad and condensed ​ ​ history of the term Afro­Latinx in the United States through references to both academic and fictitious literature. Cruz 4 between Afro­Latinxs and U.S. Blacks.4 Since then, the atmosphere to creatively discuss and respond to this experience has only grown, yet has still remained fairly singular to the notion of a teen born elsewhere and now growing up in certain urban centers, frequently New York City and Miami, where there are large concentrations not only of Latinxs but also of other minority populations, such as African Americans.5 Due to its unique history as the hub of many historically impactful events, the erasure of African descendancy in the Dominican Republic and among Dominican Americans has been widely commented. Similarly to the themes mentioned above, texts have focused on the Dominican American experience with an emphasis on migration to New York City.6 Scholarship on Dominican American culture and experiences tends to specifically refer to life on the island through the analysis of themes such as anti­Haitianism and the denial of Afro­descendancy. Scholarship also tends to contrast the history of life in the Caribbean with the history of the United States and explore how racial and nationalistic discourses overtly and subtly shape the lives of U.S.­Latinxs.7 In an attempt to widen the breadth of this conversation, I would like to fill a gap I have identified during my research. Though a variety of both academic and imaginative literature 4 See Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets, starring a young Afro­Cuban and Afro­Puerto Rican teen who ​ ​ wants to understand the full extent of Jim Crow racism in the south and is not complacent in identifying solely as Latino (and not also as black). He lives in a barrio in New York City and journeys into the deep south in his quest to understand who he is and the world he is a part of. 5 See Dahlma Llanos­Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone, a text that mixes historical fiction with mysticality in a ​ ​ story that follows an Afro­Puerto Rican woman’s lineage from life on a plantation to life navigating the streets of New York City. 6 See Junot Díaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Drown, Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ and Raquel Cepeda’s Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina. ​ ​ 7 See Blas R. Jiménez’ Afrodominicano por elección, negro por nacimiento: seudoensayos [Afro­Dominican by ​ ​ choice, black by birth], Kimberly Eison Simmons’ Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the ​ Dominican Republic, Ernesto Sagás’ Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic, Juan R. Valdéz’ Tracing ​ ​ ​ ​ Dominican Identity: The Writings of Pedro Henriquez Ureña and Silvio Torres­Saillant’s The Dominican ​ ​ Americans and The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Identity. ​ ​ ​ Cruz 5 exists today, one trend I have seen is the common adhesion to a narrative that focuses on navigating an identity crisis that is localized to urban centers as well as a scarcity of work written by second or third generation Dominican Americans who have never set foot in the Dominican Republic.
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