AfroLatinas and LatiNegras

This book shows the challenges inherent to the AfroLatina experience with a focus on Black women. The authors argue the analytical power of Intersectionality while considering the hegemonic pressures on AfroLatinidad and the essentializing moves that an intersectional approach enables resisting systems of power.

AfroLatinas as a subject of scholarship are woefully underrepresented, and this edited volume, AfroLatinas and LatiNegras: Culture, Identity, and Struggle from an Intersectional Perspective, offers an important and timely intervention. The consistent attention to AfroLatinas’ agency across all the chapters is empowering and attentive to the difficult circumstances of asserting that agency, and to the tremendous breadth of what agency can look like. The authors argue for the analytical power of the concept of Intersectionality while considering the hegemonic pressures on AfroLatinidad and the essentializing moves that an intersectional approach enables: evading, overthrowing, and resisting systems of power. Through the study of multiple cultural expressions of Blackness, such as photography, colonial inquisition records, dance, music, fiction, non-fiction, poetic memoir, and religious expression, and throughout different region of the Americas, the chapter contributors of this book consider the relationship that social and historical processes, such as sovereignty and colonialism, have on narrative and cultural production. Rosita Scerbo, Concetta Bondi, and the contributors acknowledge that racial and gender equity cannot exist without Intersectionality, and the inclusion of activist voices broadens this volume's reach and links theory to praxis.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Centering Black Women/Challenging Latinidad and Hegemonic Discourses

Rosita Scerbo and Concetta Bondi

Part I: Diasporic Rhythms and Visual Arts: Inteersecting Race and Gender in Afro-Descendent Photography, Music, and Dance

1. Opening up Black, female spaces: Dialogues with the Orishas, the City and the Mythic Space in “Banho de Folhas” by Luedji Luna and “Pra que me chamas” by Xênia França

Lesley Feracho

2. The Black Woman as Leader in the Bunde and Bullerengue

Algris Xiomara Aldeano Vásquez

3. No me llames trigueña. Claiming Puerto Rican Blackness in Adriana Parrilla’s photography

Meaghan Jeanne Coogan

4. The Resistance in the Photographic Indexical Portrayal of Afro-Latina Women in Manuel González de la Parra’s Luces de raíz negra

Kerry Green

Part II: Challenging Hegemonic Spaces: Female Leadership and Visibility in Social Activism, Educational Resources, and Spiritual Expressions of Blackness

5. Representing Candomblé in the Public Sphere: Black Priestess’ Authorship in Brazilian Cultural Production

Jamie Lee Andreson

6. The Invisible Women: An Analysis of the Representation of Afro-Latinx Women in Spanish Language Textbooks

Lillie Padilla

7. Writing and Activism: A political Perspective of AfroLatina’s Struggle in Colombia, Brazil and the Caribbean

Yesenia Escobar Espitia, Renata Dorneles Lima, Yoiseth Patricia Cabarcas, and Lindsay Gary

Part III: Re-Learning Latin America Black Past and Present: Colonial Texts and the Legacy of Afrodisporic Intergenerational Trauma

8. Repairing the Broken Strands of Afro-Latina History in Mayra Santos Febres' Fiction

Karen S. Christian

9. Afro-Mexican Women in the Northern Frontier: Subalternity, Agency, and Power Dynamics in the 17th Century

Brenda Romero

10. Blurring Genres, Blurring Borders: Contemporary Poetic Memoirs of Afro-Dominicanas in the United States

Melissa Castillo Planas

11. Papi’s Bridge: Towards a New Diasporic Dominican Identity in Clap When You Land

Keturah Nichols

Index

About the Contributors