The Afro-Latinx Experience after the Murder of George Floyd, as Seen and Lived in Puerto Rico

A couple of days ago, I had the pleasure of having lunch and a long conversation with my friend and fellow writer Esmeralda Santiago. We were talking about several topics, all centered on the issue of Latinx literature. She was asking me why very few of my books are translated into English. Why, she asked me, is there so much disconnection between Latino literature written in English and that written in Spanish, so few dialogues, gatherings, conferences, international invitations committed to bridging that gap? And let’s not talk about the institutionalized editorial invisibility of Afro-Latinx writers. Why, she asked, when people even start a conversation about literature, the issue of Afro-Latinx literature in the United States or of Afro-Latin American literature continues to be surrounded by silence. We talked for hours about the situation.

I think it is time to open our conversation to larger audiences, especially in these dire times when the United States census is proposing to define “Latinx” as a racial category and U.S. Latino conservative politicians condone a ban on Afro-Latinx literature and culture studied in Florida’s public school system. Both efforts to whiten Latinity have a long history in our lands of origin and in our diasporas. However, our discussion of Latinx identity seldom takes such history as points of departure, as frames of reference and concrete context that can produce valuable knowledge about who is an Afro-Latinx; what are the political, cultural, and social strategies behind insisting on our existence; and the act of naming Afro-Latinidad or Afro-Latinidades as an official identity in our nations and diasporas.

What I am proposing is what Afro-Dominican decolonial feminist Yuderkys Espinosa calls the exercise of creating a genealogy of experiences, specifically in this case, the act of thinking about our experience as Afro-Latinxs beyond the personal or familial. We need to compare our very diverse personal and family histories of racism, racialized poverty, migration, our relation to language, nation of origin, nation of residence, territories, barrios, communities, and hoods, to remember the ancestral knowledge passed down to us and the ways we have re-imagined our past and present identities in order to fully understand the powerful ways we exist in our worlds.

In order to start this conversation, let us begin by asking ourselves: What is an Afro-Latinx writer? Am I allowed to call myself an Afro-Latinx writer, me, a woman writer born and raised in Carolina, Puerto Rico, resident of the ancestral marron/cimarrón lands of San Mateo de Cangrejos? Can I be considered Afro-Latinx when I write short stories, novels, and poems mainly in Spanish, essays and scripts in English, when only one of my eight published poetry book collections, Boat People, has been translated into English? Three of my five novels are translated into English: Sirena Selena, Any Wednesday I Am Yours, and Our Lady of the Night. I am one of the lucky ones. Two of my novels are translated into French, really lucky. Some of my work has also been translated into Italian, Croatian, and Icelandic. There are very, very, few women writers of African descent, Black women writers in general, that have had such luck. It should not be so. However, we know why this is the case. We all know the story.

The literature we produce as writers of African descent is also racialized and therefore considered marginal, ethnic, or minor literature. International circuits of literary production are destined only for “universal literature,” that is literature written by “mainstream” writers for the “mainstream” public. Such literature addresses transcendental themes: life, death, love, war, as understood and defined by the West, by the still powerful imperial centers of culture. In case you have any doubts, those imperial centers are the former and current enclaves for the production of colonial knowledge: Anglo-U.S., France, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, and the white Creole heirs of the modern nation-building projects in Latin America since the nineteenth century wars of independence.

Indigenous literatures written in Quechua, Aymara, Tozke, Toztil, Mapuche, Garifuna, Creole, Papiamento, Palenquero, or languages other than Spanish, English, or French, are produced but they don’t circulate. We AfroLatinxs are indeed lucky. We only have to fight with small, medium, or large editorial houses to publish us in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French. That is, if we get to find time to write, translate, and edit our manuscripts at all.

But going back to my initial question: Am I allowed to call myself an AfroLatinx writer? Am I not taking unjust and inappropriate advantage of the movement that has gained momentum since the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement, especially of the way that it has re-ignited public discussions based on nation building, contemporary national and racial identities as seen through the lens of critical race theory in the North and decolonialism in the South? Am I not hitching a ride on the contemporary antiracist fashion that is sweeping our world? I think the key that unlocks the answer to my question lies in the controversial prefix “Afro” that aims to question the all-encompassing Latinx identity category as some want to present it nowadays.

The thing is that Afro-descendent identities are not “national” but “supranational,” as Guyanese cultural critic Jerome Branche argues in his beautiful essay “Malungaje: hacia una poética de la diáspora africana” (Malungaje: Toward a Poetics of the African Diaspora). We are as supranational as la trata esclavista (slave trade) was, as institutional racism is in each country of our world. Branche retells the story of how we came to be. He makes us remember that we are malungos (literally, comrades on the same African slave ship), people from many ethnicities who became racialized as blacks as soon as we were captured and sent to the New Lands in la barriga de los barcos negreros (the belly of the slave ships). Those slave ships became the womb of death, but also the odu, the matrix of new supranational identities that redefined us as brothers, sisters, primos, comadres, compadres, compère, ahijados, ahijadas de casa de santo, members of communities of faith, cabildos, sindicatos, mason houses, hoods, barrios, territories, palenques, marron settlements, cimarrones, all part of the immense family that survived the Middle Passage, super-exploitation, incarceration, genocide, lynching, police brutality, segregation, and institutional racism.

Let us not forget slavery. Founded and managed by Portugal since 1453 and its Casa Dos Escravos in West Africa and Brazil, expanded and propelled to all of the Caribbean, Central and South America by Spain since 1493, to North America and several Caribbean Islands by Great Britain, France, Belgium, Denmark and the Danish since 1680 and all throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we, as descendants of enslaved people from West, Central, and East Africa, became the first global market good. We and the fruits of our unpaid labor. The super-exploitation of our blood, sweat, and tears financed the emergence of global colonial empires and then of transnational capitalism. Today’s neoliberal capitalist societies were born mainly from la trata esclavista and the indentured labor system of racialized people in the world. Let us not forget where we come from. Let us recognize who our malungos are. Let us remember how “races” came to be.

Contemporary nations in the Americas were also born from such enslavement. The fact that I, Mayra Santos-Febres, have the name I have, write and speak in the languages I speak and write, live in the colonized Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico, U.S. territory, a nation without a state; the fact that half of my family lives in Maryland, Connecticut, or el Bronx is directly connected to the history of my ancestors’ enslavement. Therefore, I am and will always be a diasporic subject. Our relationship to “nations” will always be problematic. How can it be otherwise? Racialized poverty, social and political underrepresentation, and lack of land ownership are ancient and the very tools to displace our communities from wherever we landed, to keep us running from nation to nation in search of a better life denied by the powers that be, by the heirs of former colonial empires.

Para muestra, un botón … Did you know that Simon Bolívar, El Libertador, decreed that free black males fourteen years of age or older that refused to fight in wars of independence in Latin America would be reduced back to slavery? Did you know that in 1912 there was a Partido Negro founded in Cuba that was brutally repressed, their members executed or put in jail under the charge of treason only because Afro-Cubans wanted a political party to represent them and assure participation in democratic elections after Cuban Independence in 1898? Did you know that Afro-Argentinians are still fighting to include the category Afro in their census and that Mexico had its first census counting its Afro-Mexican population only in 2020? Did you know that the great war against the Mapuche Nation was decreed by Chile’s Independent National Government, not by the Spanish colonialists?

Further, did you know that Afro-Costa Ricans were denied citizenship until 1949-53 under the premise that they were descendants of Jamaican laborers who came to work on the Panama Canal or for the United Fruit Corporation? That Afro-Costa Rican citizenship was a political strategy to win the 1953 elections by the Liberal Party of this Central American country? Did you know that right now there is an anti-Haitian movement in the Dominican Republic extraditing Dominicans of Haitian descent and denying citizenship to Haitian families that have lived across the border for two, three generations? Did you know that, as recently as 1980, Adolfina Villanueva, mother of six, was murdered by La Fuerza de Choque in Loiza, Puerto Rico, in front of three of her children in an operative to take away the land her family lived on for three generations? Did you know that the Afro-Latinx town of Loiza, the third settlement on the island under Spanish rule and founded by free blacks in 1643, had to fight to regain its status as township, which it regained after a long struggle in 1970? No, you don’t know most of these facts, maybe one or two. This Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American history is not talked about in schools or universities. I did not know of these facts either. I had to research country by country to retrieve these facts from oblivion. The myth of racial democracy does not exist. It was built through bloodshed and invisibilization of our centennial struggles.

Nation building in the Americas, both South and North America, have been racialized projects under the command and for the benefit of white-mestizo heirs of European colonialism. Because of this project, all Afro-descendants in Latin America live under social, political, and economic marginalization. All of us. Just as in the U.S. Details vary from country to country, identity discourses also may vary, but the conditions remain the same. A century or more after the abolition of slavery, inequality and economic and political marginalization still define how we live vis-à-vis almost all of our institutions. Up north, here in the U.S African Americans and Afro-Latinxs have fought together against segregation, poverty, Jim Crow laws since June 19, 1865. I consider Afro-Puerto Ricans that have migrated to the U.S. since the nineteenth century as Boricuas as they are considered Afro-Latinx. Are Arturo Schomburg, Pura Belpre, Diosa Costello, Antonia Pantojas, Piri Thomas, Tato Laviera, Mariposa Fernández, Willie Perdomo, Juan Hernández, Sandra María Esteves, Pedro Pietri, and Pablo Yoruba Guzmán not as Boricua as they are Afro-Latinx? Don’t they face the same erasure of their presence, of their struggles, their historically invaluable contributions to their communities as many Afro-Latinxs and Afro-Latin Americans face today? Do we need to continue defining ourselves by national origins? Are we all malungas/malungos, compañeros de barco, de viaje, Afro-diasporic people?

I have seen increasing efforts listing and recommending, visibilizing, the works of Afro-Latinx writers. Most of these listings happen online, in virtual publications such as https://electricliterature.com, https://hiplatina.com, http://aintilatina.com, in English, and afrofeminas.com, hablemosescritoras.com, or diariofemenino.com in Spanish. These listings are very inspiring in trying to visibilize a vast amount of literature produced by Latinxs of African descent. I think we should keep at it. However, we need to establish our own supranational circuits of circulation, study, publication, translation, and validation of our contributions. Congresses should multiply, and supranational projects for the translation and circulation of the work of our writers and knowledge producers should also. Prizes should be given. We have the tools in our hands. Internet works, zoom links work. I think if we try to define a path, a common strategy, each one of us from our own palenque cimarrón, we can make it work. I surely hope so. Our ancestors would be happy. We have stories to tell, alliances to configure, a common struggle. More so, we have experiences, memories, and knowledge to share, a knowledge desperately needed for the nurturing and development of our malungo Afro-Latinx identities in resistance, constant change, and expansion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mayra Santos-Febres

Mayra Santos-Febres (Carolina, Puerto Rico 1966) teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, where she co-created the Creative Writing Program and founded and directed The Word / Festival de la Palabra. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has published poetry and short story collections and five novels, including the celebrated Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2001; Sirena Selena, 2001); Nuestra Señora de la noche (2006; Our Lady of the Night, 2009); and La amante de Gardel (2015; Gardel’s Lover). Her essays include Tratado de medicina natural para hombres melancólicos (2011; Treatise on Natural Medicine for Melancholic Men) and Sobre piel y papel (2011; On Skin and Paper).