Movementmovement

Edited by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer A. Jones, and Tianna S. Paschel

AFRO-LATIN@S IN MOVEMENTMOVEMENT

Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas Afro-Latin@ Diasporas The Afro-Latin@ Diasporas Book Series publishes scholarly and cre- ative writing on the African diasporic experience in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The Series includes books which address all aspects of Afro-Latin@ life and cultural expression throughout the hemisphere, with a strong focus on Afro-Latin@s in the United States. This Series is the fi rst-of-its-kind to combine such a broad range of topics, including religion, race, transnational identity, history, literature, music and the arts, social and cultural theory, biography, class and economic relations, gender, sexuality, sociology, politics, and migration.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14759 Petra R. Rivera-Rideau • Jennifer A. Jones • Tianna S. Paschel Editors Afro-Latin@s in Movement

Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas Editors Petra R. Rivera-Rideau Tianna S. Paschel Wellesley College University of California Berkeley Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA Berkeley, California, USA

Jennifer A. Jones University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana , USA

Afro-Latin@ Diasporas ISBN 978-1-137-60320-3 ISBN 978-1-137-59874-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59874-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016907723

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Printed on acid-free paper

Cover illustration: © Stephen Hepworth / Alamy Stock Photo.

Series logo inspired by “Le Marron Inconnu” by Haitian sculptor Albert Mangones

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York The 2016 publications in the Afro-Latin@ Diasporas Book Series are in loving memory of Juan Flores, teacher, mentor, scholar, and friend.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several people and institutions made this book possible. First and fore- most, we would like to thank the Afro-Latin@ Diasporas series editors, Juan Flores, Miriam Jiménez Román , and Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, for inviting us to edit this volume and for their support of our work. We wish to extend our warmest thanks to the Inter-University Program for Latino Research and the many academic units at the University of Notre Dame for their support of this volume. Specifi cally, we would like to thank Tom McNeil and the Institute for Latino Studies for their sponsorship, as well as the Anderson Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Jose E. Fernandez Hispanic Caribbean Initiative, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Department of Africana Studies, the Department of American Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, and Multicultural Student Programs and Services for their support. Special thanks must be given to Timothy Matovina, Idalia Maldonado, and Maribel Rodriguez, for all their assis- tance with this project. We must also thank the Center for the Study of Politics, Culture and Society at the University of Chicago for its support of the book conference that made this volume possible. In addition, we would like to thank our research assistants for their help: Jaime Sánchez at the University of Chicago and Jessica Herling, Talitha Rose, and Sofi a Ruhkin at Virginia Tech. Richard Caraballo and Natalia Linares were instrumental in making possible the interview with Los Rakas. At Palgrave Macmillan, we would like to thank Shaun Vigil and Erica Buchman for their guidance and support of this project. A special

vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS acknowledgment must be given to Alejandro de la Fuente, Nena Torres, Ramona Hernandez, and Timothy Matovina, who supported this project from the very beginning. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their constant support. CONTENTS

1 Introduction: Theorizing Afrolatinidades 1 Petra R. Rivera-Rideau , Jennifer A. Jones , and Tianna S. Paschel

Part 1 Imagining Afrolatinidades 31 Jossianna Arroyo

2 The Expediency of Blackness: Racial Logics and Danzón in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico 35 Hettie Malcomson

3 “Ni de aquí, ni de allá”: Garífuna Subjectivities and the Politics of Diasporic Belonging 61 Paul Joseph López Oro

4 The Death of “la Reina de la Salsa:” Celia Cruz and the Mythifi cation of the Black Woman 85 Monika Gosin

5 “Oye, Qué Bien Juegan Los Negros, ¿No?”: Blaxicans and Basketball in Mexico 109 Walter Thompson-Hernández

ix x CONTENTS

6 Ritmo Negro: Visions of Afro-Latin America 131 Umi Vaughan

Part 2 Rethinking the Archive 135 Nancy Raquel Mirabal

7 Afro-Latin@ Nueva York: Maymie De Mena and the Unsung Afro-Latina Leadership of the UNIA 141 Melissa Castillo-Garsow

8 Listening to Afro-Latinidad: The Sonic Archive of Olú Clemente 171 Patricia Herrera

9 Panabay Pride: A Conversation with Los Rakas 195 Petra R. Rivera-Rideau

10 The Afro-LAtino Project 211 Walter Thompson-Hernández

Part 3 Diasporic Politics 215 Juliet Hooker

11 Translating Negroes into Negros: Rafael Serra’s Transamerican Entanglements Between Black Cuban Racial and Imperial Subalternity, 1895–1909 221 José I. Fusté

12 The Transnational Circulation of Political References: The Black Brazilian Movement and Antiracist Struggles of the Early Twentieth Century 247 Amilcar Araujo Pereira CONTENTS xi

13 Every Day Is Black Heritage Month: A Conversation Between Yvette Modestin and Tianna S. Paschel 269 Yvette Modestin and Tianna S. Paschel

14 Afterword: Afro-Latinos and Afro-Latin American Studies 289 Alejandro de la Fuente

Index 305

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jossianna Arroyo is Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Travestismos Culturales: Literatura y Etnografía en Cuba y Brasil (2003) and Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (Palgrave, 2013). She is working on a book on contemporary media circuits in the Caribbean and the politics of race, racialization, and vis- ibility in global times. Melissa Castillo-Garsow is a PhD candidate in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. Her short stories, articles, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous outlets including Acentos Review , Hispanic Culture Review , CNN.com, El Diario/La Prensa , The Bilingual Review , and Women’s Studies . She coauthored the novel Pure Bronx in 2013 and is cur- rently editing La Verdad: A Reader of Hip Hop Latinidades , an anthology of Afro- Latino poetry, and a special issue on Brazilian hip-hop for the journal, Words Beats and Life: A Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture. Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also the director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard. De la Fuente is the author of Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (2008) and of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (2001). He is also the curator of two art exhibitions deal- ing with issues of race, Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (2010–2012) and Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (ongoing). De la Fuente is working on a comparative study of slaves and the laws of Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana.

xiii xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

José I. Fusté is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at University of California, Los Angeles. His research employs historiographic methods, literary and cultural analysis, and critical ethnic studies theories to reveal the intersections and transnational dimensions of Afro- Latin@ antiracist and anti-imperialist social movements in the United States. He is working on a book titled The Empire Strikes Black: Anti-Racism, U.S. Imperialism, and the Entanglements of Afro-Latin@ Caribbean Identity, 1895–1975. Monika Gosin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the College of William and Mary. Gosin’s research and teaching interests include Latina/o and Africana studies, race and gender in popular culture and media, and intergroup relations. She is writing a book which situates Black Cubans within a historical analysis of African American and white Cuban exile relations in Miami and examines how Afro- Latina/o positionality intervenes in Black-Latino confl ict. Patricia Herrera is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Richmond. Herrera’s teaching and research focuses on contemporary theater and performance with an emphasis on social justice, identity politics, and transnationalism. She is writing a book which critically examines the work of female artists of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe between 1973 and 2010. She articles have appeared in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy , Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of MALCS , African American Review , and Public: A Journal of Imagining America. Juliet Hooker is Associate Professor of Government and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Hooker is a political theorist whose primary research interests include black political thought, Latin American political thought, political solidarity, and multiculturalism and has also published widely on Afro-descendant and indigenous politics and multicultural rights in Latin America. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (2009) and is working on a book comparing the accounts of race formulated by prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century and Latin American political thinkers. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Politics, Groups and Identities , Souls , Journal of Latin American Studies , and Latin American Research Review . Jennifer A. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Latino Studies. Her research uses qualitative methods to explore three distinct sources of change in the contemporary landscape—increasing migration, the growing multiracial population, and shifting social relations between and within racial groups, with an emphasis on the experience of Afro-Latino populations in Mexico and the Caribbean. Her work has appeared in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies , Latino Studies , Sociology of Race and Ethnicity , and Sociological Perspectives . NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Paul Joseph López Oro is a doctoral student in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation project is on second- and third-generation Garifuna Central Americans in New York City and how they negotiate/perform/defi ne/live in the in-between- ness of blackness, indigeneity, and Latinidad. Hettie Malcomson is a Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Southampton, UK. With a background in social anthropology and music, she holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Cambridge. She has conducted ethnographic research with danzón practitioners in Mexico and new music composers in the UK. Nancy Raquel Mirabal is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies/US Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mirabal holds a PhD in history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has been a prolifi c writer on Afro-diasporic studies and is the author of Unthinkable Visibilities: Diaspora, Masculinity, and the Racial Politics of Cubanidad in New York (NYU Press). Her next study examines the politics of dissonant dis- courses, gentrifi cation, spatial fi ctions, and racialized displacements. Yvette Modestin is a writer, poet, and activist. She is Founder/Executive Director of Encuentro Diaspora Afro in Boston, Massachusetts. Modestin is the Diaspora Coordinator of the Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas, y de la Diáspora, a national and international network of Afro-descendant women. As an artist, a mental health clinician, a wellness facilitator, and an Ifá practitioner, Modestin speaks to the acknowledgment of the historical pain of people of African descent and the awareness of the diasporic connection that would lead to the heal- ing of our communities. Tianna S. Paschel is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affi liated with the Center for Latin American Studies and the Institute for the Study of Social Change. Previously she was Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her research explores the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in the African diaspora in Latin America. She is the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil. (Princeton University Press, 2016). Amilcar Araujo Pereira is an Assistant Professor of the School of Education at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). During the 2015–2016 academic year, Pereira was a Fulbright-Capes Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) at Columbia University, New York. Pereira holds a PhD in history. He is the author of the book “O Mundo Negro”: Relações Raciais e a Constituição do Movimento Negro no Brasil (2013) and coeditor of Histórias do Movimento Negro no Brasil (with Verena Alberti, 2007), Ensino de História e xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Culturas Afro-Brasileiras e Indígenas (with Ana Maria Monteiro, 2013), and Educação e Diversidade em Diferentes Contextos (with Warley da Costa, 2015). Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. Her research has appeared in journals such as Popular Music and Society , Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies , and Identities: Global Studies in Cultural and Power , and she has received funding from agencies such as the Ford Predoctoral Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council, and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. Rivera-Rideau’s fi rst book, Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico , was published in 2015. Walter Thompson-Hernández is a recent graduate of the Stanford Latin American Studies Master’s program and a current PhD Student in the UCLA Chicana and Chicano Studies Department. His writing, photographs, and research have been featured in NPR, BBC, Fusion, Los Angeles Times, and CNN. Umi Vaughan is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. He is an artist and anthropologist who explores dance, creates photographs and performances, and writes on African diaspora culture. Vaughan is the coauthor of Carlos Aldama's Life in Batá: Cuba, Diaspora, and the Drum and Rebel Dance, Renegade Stance: Timba Music and Black Identity in Cuba . LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.1 “Tengo Identitdad y Confío en el Censo” fl yer from Honduras 74 Fig. 6.1 Hip Hop Havana, Cuba 133 Fig. 6.2 No es fácil/Money Worries, Santiago de Cuba 133 Fig. 6.3 ¿Cuál?/Which?, Havana, Cuba 134 Fig. 6.4 Irmãs/Hermanas/Sistas, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil 134 Fig. 10.1 The Afro-LAtino project 1 212 Fig. 10.2 The Afro-LAtino project 2 213 Fig. 10.3 The Afro-LAtino project 3 213 Fig. 10.4 The Afro-LAtino project 4 214

xvii CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Theorizing Afrolatinidades

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau , Jennifer A. Jones , and Tianna S. Paschel

In 1978, Afro-Puerto Rican salsero Ismael Rivera released the song “Las Caras Lindas (de mi gente negra)” [The Beautiful Faces (of my Black People)] in his album, Esto Sí Es Lo Mio . Written by Afro-Puerto Rican Tite Curet Alonso, the song celebrates the beauty and resilience of “mi gente negra” in the face of widespread racism and injustice. Since that time, a diverse group of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latino musi- cians have recorded the song, including Afro-Cubans, Celia Cruz, and Adalberto Álvarez y Su Son; Afro-Peruvians, Susana Baca and Eva Ayllón; Afro-Colombian, Lisandro Meza; and the Afro-Puerto Rican folkloric group, Yubá Iré; among others.1 “Las Caras Lindas (de mi gente negra)” is one of the defi ning tracks for two important Afro-Puerto Ricans who shaped the island’s popular music. One of the most prolifi c salsa composers of our time, Curet Alonso often tackled political issues in his songs, such as workers’ rights, colonialism, and the injustices of slavery. He was also known for composing songs that

P. R. Rivera-Rideau () Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA J. A. Jones University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA T. S. Paschel University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA , USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1 P.R. Rivera-Rideau et al. (eds.), Afro-Latin@s in Movement, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59874-5_1 2 P.R. RIVERA-RIDEAU ET AL. specifi cally addressed contemporary racial issues; as salsa legend, Cheo Feliciano refl ected, “It wasn’t normal at the time he began doing it, but he always talked of what it meant to be Black, and he had the courage to say he was proud of who he was.”2 Curet Alonso wrote “Las Caras Lindas” for Ismael Rivera, another Afro-Puerto Rican musical icon. Rivera began his career with Rafael Cortijo y su Combo, a band that not only revolutionized popular music with its unique blends of Afro-Puerto Rican traditions but also one that broke important racial barriers on television and in elite performance venues.3 Rivera’s distinctive performance style, masterful improvisational skills, and unique voice were all rooted in Afro- Caribbean and Afro-Puerto Rican aesthetics. “Las Caras Lindas” became one of his most popular hits. Despite its strong connections to Puerto Rico, the song did not specifi - cally detail places, histories, or fi gures unique to the island. Instead, the lyrics offered a more general message that celebrated the resilience and beauty of black communities. To be sure, the song’s message was, and remains, relevant in Puerto Rico, where antiblack racism persists despite rhetoric that extolls the racially mixed “great Puerto Rican family.” At the same time, the lyrics also resonated with Afro-Latin American communities throughout the region, as well as with Afro-Latinos in the United States, who faced similar forms of antiblack racism, evident in the multiple recordings of the song since 1978 by artists such as Peruvian Susana Baca, Colombian Lisandro Meza, or Cuban band Adalberto Álvarez y su Son, among others. Indeed, whether from Peru, the United States, Colombia, or elsewhere, each version of “Las Caras Lindas” retained Curet Alonso’s original message of black pride and overcoming adversity. We might assume that part of the song’s tremendous success, as well as the frequent rerecordings of the song by other Afro-Latin American performers, stems from the recognition of “Las Caras Lindas” as an important contestation of racism, which many members of these communities could relate to. And yet, each rendition of the song contains localized sounds and instrumentation, from the cumbia accordion riffs of Colombian Lisandro Meza to the cajón beats of Peruvian bands. This is because blackness—or the socially constructed meanings and qualities associated with being black—differs depending on distinct national and historical contexts. Accordingly, the remakes of “Las Caras Lindas” locate the message in very distinct national contexts and refl ect diverse approaches to integrating blackness into their respective national identities. In this INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING AFROLATINIDADES 3 sense, they retained the song’s overall message that celebrated blackness to counter the comparable forms of antiblack racism their respective communities faced, while they also employed musical aesthetics oftentimes linked to local African-based traditions that rooted this message in very specifi c geographic and historical contexts. Perhaps one of the more interesting examples of “Las Caras Lindas’” impact on sites outside of Puerto Rico was its use in a 2005 Colombian census campaign that Afro-Colombian activists named after the song. Beyond encouraging people to identify as black on the census, the campaign also “advanced a defi nition of blackness as being rooted in a shared history of slavery and ongoing experiences of racial discrimination.”4 Thus, the census campaign employed the song celebrating resilience and blackness as part of an explicit protest of internalized antiblack racism in Colombia. These multiple renditions of “Las Caras Lindas” clearly demonstrate how the circulation of cultural practices across geographic borders impact local understandings of blackness, which, in turn, are linked together via recognition of similar experiences with anti-black racism in the Americas. In this sense, the popularity of “Las Caras Lindas” across different historical periods and geographies underscores the need for a transnational understanding of afrolatinidad . Much of the work on afrolatinidad has been conducted from one of two geographical camps: Latin America and the Caribbean, or the United States. However, there are many reasons to move toward a more transnational understanding of afrolatinidad. First, the Americas have been shaped by massive and continual migrations of people, which further complicates the idea that our understandings of Afro-Latin America can be reasonably dis- tinguished from the study of Afro-Latinos in the United States. The circulations of Afro-Latinos throughout the hemisphere are embodied in the large Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central American diasporas in places like New York City, as well as lesser-known cases like Afro-Mexican migrants who have settled in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Second, the Americas are a region characterized by the constant exchange of ideas about race and nation among political elites, as well as among Afro-Latino and Afro-Latin American citizens who sought to challenge hegemonic nationalist projects. While in recent decades, these political encounters have taken the form of various attempts to build a Pan- Afro-Latin American movement, in the early part of the twentieth century, they consisted of intellectual exchanges between Afro-Latin American and 4 P.R. RIVERA-RIDEAU ET AL.

African-American thinkers such as Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, who collaborated not only creatively, but in a transnational critique of antiblack racism. Together, these circulations have not only profoundly shaped identity formation processes, but have also catalyzed the emergence of inherently transnational cultural forms such as salsa, champeta, and reg- gaetón. Further, as the “Las Caras Lindas” example demonstrates well, such cultural expressions are often especially politicized in the context of Latin America. This perpetual movement of people, politics, and culture undermines the separation of the study of Afro-Latin America from that of Afro-Latinos in the United States. Building on scholarship that has taken more diasporic approaches to thinking about race, marginalization, and antiblackness, Afro-Latin@s in Movement foregrounds the inherently transnational character of afrolatinidad. In bringing together innovative essays on both Latin America and the United States, this volume takes a decided hemi- spheric and transnational approach. While the works included here span both geography and time, what they share is an analysis of the dynamic and continual circulation of people, cultural representations, and politics. We suggest that such a transnational approach—that analyzes the shared artic- ulations of blackness across the Americas, but which also takes seriously their unique manifestations and movements across space—offers a more complete understanding of the politics of race and nation in the Americas.

BLACKNESS AND LATINIDAD IN THE AMERICAS Scholarship on blackness in Latin America has deep roots in the political struggles over race and nation in the region. The fi rst wave of scholarship emerged in the early twentieth century when newly independent Latin American nations were making sense of their past, present, and future. After decades of policies aimed at whitening the population, Latin American political elites turned to mestizaje narratives that held that, rather than lead to “mongrelization,” the phenotypic and cultural mixture of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples was in fact the strength of the region. Although countless works have analyzed these nationalist narrative shifts, we rarely think about the scholarship that undergirded such ideologies. While some nationalist thinkers such as José Vasconcelos in Mexico and José Martí in Cuba advanced their ideas of racial transcendence through political theory, many others who we also hold as nationalist fi gures based INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING AFROLATINIDADES 5 their ideas on robust empirical analyses of slavery and of contemporary society. Authors such as Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, Tomás Blanco in Puerto Rico, and Gilberto Freyre in Brazil shared similar scholarly approaches, which greatly infl uenced how individual nations understood the racial makeup of their populations.5 This scholarship emerged primarily in the places where enslaved Africans came in greater numbers and over longer periods of time (e.g. Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean).6 More importantly, these scholars emphasized what they argued was an inherent racial egalitarianism in their societies, which they saw as directly linked to racial mixture itself. Finally, Freyre, Blanco, and Ortiz used historical and anthropological analysis to make the defi nitive case for the importance of race mixture, and particu- larly, the value of African culture, in the construction and future of their respective nations. In this way, they saw themselves as offering a direct challenge to dominant ideas based in scientifi c racism and eugenics that placed whiteness or Europeanness at the top of the social order, and blackness or Africanness at the bottom. These thinkers did, in fact, challenge some aspects of biological essentialism, namely, the idea of an objective and singular racial hierarchy with pure whiteness as its pinnacle. However, these ideological projects were rife with deep contradictions. First, these nationalist thinkers often restricted the “African” contributions to the nation to particular areas: music, dance, food, physical strength, and sexual prowess. In so doing, and perhaps inadvertently, they reproduced the very racial hierarchy they sought to subvert. Indeed, following this logic, Africans did not give Brazilians and Puerto Ricans their intelligence or ingenuity, but their sense of rhythm. Second, while these thinkers largely saw themselves as moving beyond biological essentialism, ideas of racial difference based in the blood still pervaded their writings. What is more, to the extent that they left biological essentialism behind at all, they often replaced it with a type of cultural essentialism that often reifi ed the problematic idea of “African culture” as static and monolithic.7 An article written by Gilberto Freyre in 1952 further highlights these various contradictions:

Brazilian quadroon or octoroon girls have a special charm that harmonizes peculiarly with the forms and colours of the tropical landscape. It is rarely attained by completely White girls or girls with only a touch of Indian blood. And it is common, now, in Brazil to observe, in even the whitest Brazilian girls, a sort of subtle or indirect imitation of this type of feminine 6 P.R. RIVERA-RIDEAU ET AL.

beauty or grace, as in the Negro’s rhythm of walking, and her grace in dancing and smiling. 8

Despite these serious tensions, these mid-century works on blackness in Latin America inspired an entire generation of scholars who similarly held that race relations in this region were unique, especially when compared to the United States. In Brazil, these works even traced the country’s racial egalitarianism to a more benevolent and cordial system of slavery.9 The second wave of literature on blackness in Latin America, span- ning from the 1950s to the 1970s, largely emerged in response to the previous accounts of Latin American exceptionalism.10 Beginning with the famous UNESCO studies on race relations in Brazil in the 1950s, this work was done by sociologists and historians concerned with challenging the previous era’s idea of racial paradise and revealing systemic patterns of racial inequality.11 Outside of Brazil, other scholars also produced scholarship that pointed out similar contradictions and patterns of inequality in their countries.12 Though, if Brazil dominated the fi rst two waves of studies of blackness in Latin America, geographic expansion primarily characterizes a third, contemporary wave. Alongside the cases where we typically locate blackness in Latin America were an increasing number of important works on the lesser-studied cases (e.g. Peru, Argentina, and Mexico). This period also marked the emergence of a more interesting set of substantive questions about the articulation of blackness across historical periods, and across sites of contestation. Rather than being caught up in the same debates about whether or not these countries were racial paradises, what has marked scholarship of the last few decades is an attempt to uncover the ways in which race and racial logics mattered for social, political, and economic relations in these countries. Indeed, the question shifted from asking if race matters in Latin America, to asking how it mattered. This led to a proliferation of scholarship on blackness in Latin America in a number of important, substantive directions. First, scholars reexam- ined how blackness fi gured into statecraft and nationalist ideologies13 and also offered deeper analyses of how race patterned inequality in this region.14 The second dimension of expansion was by discipline; the third wave of scholarship on blackness in Latin America was produced not only by sociologists and historians but also by a diverse group of scholars inter- ested in the politics of identity and everyday life in contemporary Latin America.15 Beyond state practices, a plethora of work examines blackness INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING AFROLATINIDADES 7 and racial formation at the micro and meso levels, theorizing identity formation on the ground as well as examining the role of popular culture in shaping social identities and articulating a racial politics. 16 The expansion of disciplinary perspectives and research foci also foregrounded the profound entanglements of blackness with gender and sexuality.17 Together, these works offer a clear window into how dominant ideas of blackness are constructed, reproduced, or challenged in these countries. Third, in contrast to previous accounts that had largely ignored black political mobilization, these new works sought to explore this issue head-on. In so doing, they asked important questions about the conditions under which black identity did or did not become politicized, as well as the relationship between black identity and other bases of political organizing, such as class and region.18 Arguably, the main impetus of this expansion was the rapidly changing political and ideological context in these countries. Indeed, in the 2000s, several scholars tried to make sense of the increased politicization of blackness throughout Latin America, and the shift in the orientation of many states in the region around racial questions. 19 Whereas very few Latin American states collected data on their black populations in the twentieth century, by 2010, nearly every country did.20 More importantly, a number of them—Nicaragua, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia—also recognized the collective rights for certain black populations for the fi rst time. In the latter two cases, states also adopted affi rma- tive action policies.21 This radical change not only prompted scholarship that tried to make sense of how and why these policies came about but also analyzed their implications for politics and society.22 Taken together, these works have offered textured, multifaceted, and locally situated answers to the question of how blackness gets articulated in the Americas. Rather than reproduce the idea of Latin American countries as racial paradises, these accounts point to the ambiguities of race in this region, what Peter Wade has referred to as the “absent presence of race.” 23 On the one hand, we see a picture in which race is fl uid and racial categories are far from discrete, permanent, or necessarily salient in the way that ordinary people make sense of their lives in these countries. On the other, they show convincingly that despite its mutability, ideas of racial difference are deeply entrenched in social relations across this region. Indeed, despite much variation across countries, blackness seems to function as an abject, immutable category, a symbolic container for everything bad in these societies. Thus, Latin America is perhaps best understood as a region that shares profound tensions between mestizaje 8 P.R. RIVERA-RIDEAU ET AL. and antiblackness, between inclusion and othering, and between essential- izing and transcending race.24 Yet while this scholarship is incredibly useful in framing the chapters in this volume—and for thinking about afrolatinidad more generally—it fails to take transnationalism seriously save for a few notable exceptions. For example, in 1980 Pierre-Michel Fontaine put forth the concept of “Afro- Latin America,” which he defi ned as “all regions of Latin America where signifi cant groups of people of known African ancestry are found.”25 Building on this concept, historian George Reid Andrews defi ned Afro- Latin America as “those regions or societies where people of African ancestry constituted at least 5–10 percent of the total population.” Further, he emphasized that the boundaries around Afro-Latin America were con- stantly in “movement,” and as such we should understand it not as a “fi xed or immutable entity” but rather as something that “ebbs and fl ows.”26 We share this idea of afrolatinidad as inherently mutable. However, rather than speak of movement in purely demographic terms, we suggest that afrolatinidad is fundamentally a product of broader movements—of culture, people, and politics—across national boundaries and within the Americas. We now turn to the literature on Latinos in the United States to see if it might offer an important bridge—analytically and metaphorically—to understanding afrolatinidad in a more transnational way.

LATINIDAD IN THE UNITED STATES Latinidad in the United States has long been understood as both a demographic and political puzzle—an ongoing social and political project rather than a given. Scholars such as G. Cristina Mora, Clara Rodriguez, Laurie K. Sommers, Arlene Dávila, and others, have decisively argued that Latinidad has been constructed and produced, not merely through individual processes of identity formation, but through micro-, meso-, and macro-level processes. At the macro-level, scholars have argued that Latino identity has been shaped through migration and immigration policy,27 domestic legislation and court cases,28 and through the US government’s efforts to count Latinos (albeit not consistently until 1980) through the US Census. At the meso-level, Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others, used social movements, the media, and non- government organizations, to negotiate what it would mean to be Latino and who would belong.29 And at the micro-level, individuals make choices daily regarding the ways in which Latino identity is made meaningful.30 INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING AFROLATINIDADES 9

Underlying these processes of constructing Latinidad from the very beginning has been the issue of race. Since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which conferred offi cial white status on Mexicans who would now be residing in US territory, the question of race among US Latinos has been a contentious one. The meaning of Latino identity, and whether it was racial, has long been skirted in US policy, in which Latinos alone have been counted as an ethnic group. Similarly, desegregation cases in Mexican-American communities were decided not as a result of racial discrimination, but because Latinos were deemed to have experienced a special class of discrimination based on language and ancestry.31 Relatedly, scholars have argued that while Mexicans retained legal status as whites, they were never perceived that way by Americans. Puerto Ricans were, alternately, valued for their whiteness and derided for their blackness, and at times imagined to be a distinct racial group, as is the case with Nuyoricans, or Puerto Ricans who live in New York.32 Despite the historical presence of Afro-Cubans in the United States, Cuban-Americans were imagined as white with the potential to assimilate into the American mainstream, until the arrival of large numbers of Afro-Cubans with the Mariel boat lifts in the 1980s complicated these assumptions.33 Since then, the infl ux of “new” groups of Latinos such as Panamanians and Dominicans has further complicated the relationship between race, blackness, and Latinidad. Other scholars, such as Jorge Duany, José Cobas, Rubén Rumbaut, and Leo Chavez have highlighted that the perception of Latinos as perpetual foreign threats has also racialized Latinos in particular ways. From this perspective, Latinidad emerges from a consistent and persistent experience of othering and economic disadvantage in the US context. This process, they argue, is what has conferred a unique shared experience on Latinos who only become Latino within the US context, and whose experience is made meaningful through exclusion and discrimination. Of course, the question of the internalization of this category remains, as while nearly 40% of Latino census takers have consistently opted to check “some other race” rather than black or white on the census, the vast majority of the remainder select white.34 Some scholars have interpreted this pattern to mean that Latinos are asserting a racial category that is neither black nor white, while others perceive these results as an attachment to whiteness, perhaps consistent with identities in the home country, or perhaps in an 10 P.R. RIVERA-RIDEAU ET AL. effort to accrue social and political benefi ts, not unlike those reluctantly conferred on Mexicans at the turn of the twentieth century.35 As a result, much of the debate over Latinidad in the United States has sought to tackle the question of race, and whether such a label can apply to all Latinos as one group. In response, many Latino Studies scholars embrace fl uidity and ambiguity as a defi ning part of the Latino experience. Perhaps ironically, just as attachments to mestizaje began to fade in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of US Latinos borrowed mestizaje to argue that there is something uniquely mixed about Latinos that both gives them collective meaning and transcends national origins.36 Much of this work was produced on the heels of social movements such as the Chicano movement of the 1960s, which embraced Aztlán as their spiritual homeland and as the crux of Chicano identity, while also distancing it from blackness.37 In a similar vein, Gloria Anzaldúa’s semi- nal Borderlands/La Frontera and collaboration with Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back , 38 both exemplifi ed and cemented the infl uence of this narrative in the US context, arguing for an identity politics that embraces being both mixed and between. In this way, Anzaldúa produced what Juan Flores has called Latino Studies’ guiding metaphor of “la frontera ,” which brought to the fore an understanding of Latinidad shaped primarily by both movement across borders, racial and national.39 In sub- sequent decades, this conceptualization of the US Latino as a mestizo , transnational subject, has been at the core of much of the scholarship that seeks to articulate Latinidad.40 Transnationalism has also been central to the construction of Latinidad, in part because of the signifi cant movement of people across borders.41 The growth of the Latino population into the largest minority group in the United States, its increasing national, ethnic, and racial diversity since the 1980s, and the rising numbers of Latinos in virtually every state, con- tinue to make immigration central to theorizing Latinidad. Because distinctive citizenship policies shape the experiences of national origin groups in profoundly different ways, many scholars and policymakers alike won- der whether Latinos’ diverse origins and transnational attachments may preclude an internal sense of cohesion, or serve as the source of it. Indeed, what binds Latinos today, many would argue, is a set of meanings and experiences that are linked to assumptions about the migration process. Whether it is being perceived as foreign, holding ties to Latin America, or experiencing discrimination, it is this aspect of Latino identity that is dis- tinctly American. It is also a subject that is understood as deeply transna- INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING AFROLATINIDADES 11 tional, as bodies move back and forth. In the United States, immigration continues to be framed both productively and problematically as a Latino issue, infusing Latinidad with a necessarily transnational subject position. Yet for all its progressive liminality, blackness is largely omitted from academic constructions of Latinidad in the US. In part, this is shaped by the unique race rules of the United States, in which hypo-descent historically defi ned blackness. More broadly though, it is the way in which Latinidad has been constructed as sometimes black, or aspirationally white, on the one hand, and nonwhite, mestizo, or brown, on the other, that has precluded, by defi nition, the possibility of a Latinidad that is compatible with blackness. For example, recent debates over whether to reformulate Latino into an offi cial race category on the US census necessarily omit consideration of Afro-Latinos as part and parcel of the Latino category. As a result of these assumptions, Afro-Latinos have been deeply marginal- ized from mainstream Latino discourse, both political and academic. It is this alienation that prompted Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores’ assertion that afrolatinidad requires a “triple consciousness. ” 42 Building on Du Bois’ conception of double consciousness in the United States, Jiménez Román and Flores posit that afrolatinidad adds another challenging layer to the racialized experience, undermining dominant conceptions of Latinidad, blackness, and Americanness as incompatible identities. Triple consciousness thus makes evident the ways that, as Tanya Kateri Hernandez argues, Afro-Latinos, and therefore blackness, remain unintelligible within our understandings of mestizo Latinidad, and therefore outside of the Latino imaginary.43

TOWARD A TRANSNATIONAL BLACKNESS There is much lost in the separation of literature on race in Latin America and that of Latinos in the United States. On the one hand, the scholarship on Latinos in the US takes as a point of departure something that is a guiding premise of this book, that Latinidad is inherently raced and transnational. Yet the literature on Latinidad also comes with much of the conceptual and political baggage of mestizaje , which is being vigorously debated and destabilized in Latin America today. On the other hand, by centering blackness and problematizing mestizaje , the literature on race in Latin America gives us many conceptual tools for understanding how afrolatinidad is constructed, how it is lived and contested, and how it changes over time. Even so, it focuses on a bounded idea of blackness as 12 P.R. RIVERA-RIDEAU ET AL. being articulated exclusively within the nation-state, rather than through cross-national fl ows. While the literatures on (Afro-)Latin Americans and (Afro-)Latinos have been largely conceptualized as distinct, some scholars have addressed the ways in which conceptions of race and identity fl ow across borders, especially in regard to understanding US Afro-Latino identities. In Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, and Afro-Latinos , editors Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler aim to bring together scholarship from the United States and Latin America that emphasizes “the fl ow and counterfl ow of racial ideas.”44 They argue that a transnational approach is critical to understanding blackness and Latinidad across the Americas “in view of the current circular or return migration patterns of people of Latin American descent to and from the United States and the potential impact of this demographic phenomenon in redefi ning racial and ethnic relations in this society, understanding the historical and contemporary racial representations in Latin America, as well as how these are being transplanted and reformulated in the context of U.S. racial ideologies.” 45 Similarly, Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores argue that “any understanding of the [U.S.] Afro-Latin@ experience must be guided by a clear appreciation of the transnational discourse or identity fi eld linking black Latin Americans and Latin@s across national and regional lines.”46 More recently, literary scholar Claudia Milian proposed the concept “Latinities” to attend to the fl uidity and contestations around US Latino identities in part to emphasize their connections to blackness. 47 This volume takes heed of this insistence to approach afrolatinidad transnationally. However, rather than assume the unidirectionality of these fl ows, we demonstrate that the movement of ideas of blackness is multivalent, continuous, and ever-changing. Acknowledging the shifting dynamics of afrolatinidad from a hemi- spheric perspective opens up the space to ask new empirical questions. For instance, how do ideas about blackness move across the Americas, not only from the US to Latin America but also from Latin America to the United States? How do people’s ideas about blackness shift (or not) when they encounter new forms of politics or cultural representations from elsewhere? How are we to make sense of the politicization of blackness in Latin America both historically and in the contemporary period when we consider the types of transnational exchanges that are so central to this book? In this volume, we consider how the concept of afrolatinidad chal- lenges the racial projects of Latin America and US Latinidad in ways that