May Day Check-in
How are you feeling? What’s on your mind? How can I help to facilitate a successful end of the semester?
Central Ideas
“To be negra is not something you choose but something placed on you, policed and rejected in you.” (93)
“It is pivotal that we recall negro in its transnational translation from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States and back as always “Black”… Doing so allows us to grapple with the debates and disagreements around how mestizaje and White supremacy are indeed intertwined in ways that occlude Blackness yet give license for AfroLatinidad to be usurped.” (94)
“I argue that when thinking about negro (Black) and negritud (Blackness) from a transnational Spanish Caribbean context, we should remember that AfroLatinidad, or Black Latinidad, is first and foremost about Black lives, embodied experiences, movement, translatability, and untranslatability. These things must always be at the center. What is at stake when we do not do this? We run the risk of reinscribing mestizaje and White supremacy.” (94)
“The body is where Blackness ends and begins. That stayed with me. Hence, my use of negro to center the experience, people, memories, and archives that our cuerpos negros (Black bodies) create… We must re-center not only Blackness but also the affectual, gestural, nonverbal, and verbal codes that make up what we come to understand as negro. (96-7)
Presentation
Co-opting Afro-Latinidad
“When Puerto Rican Bronx rapper Fat Joe says in an interview, “We are all Black,” or when White Latinos/as/xs say, “I’m AfroLatinx too,” they are invisibilizing and minimizing the socioeconomic and violent everyday realities of visibly Black Latinos/as/xs. When I ask why or how this is happening, my scholar friends remind me that these are normal practices of mestizaje in which the racial triage (White, Black, Indigenous) can be Black too. In other words, non-Black Latinos/as/xs laying claims to Blackness or AfroLatinidad is only another way of reinscribing mestizaje and White supremacy by failing to name Whiteness and usurping Blackness as part of their own racially mixed identity politics.” (95)
How does this example help support Zamora’s central argument?
“Negritud is also not bounded or enclosed by space or time. We live in the now and the future, today, forever, and always. Black popular cultures emerge from Black beings and epistemologies before they are ever appropriated into a national cultural identity.” (99)
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