Triple-Consciousness? Approaches to Afro-Latino Culture in the United States

Abstract

While the idea of Afro-Latinos generally refers to African-descendant peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean, in recent years greater attention has been paid to the situation of Black Latinos in the United States, where Latinos and African Americans are frequently counter-posed and pitted against one another in a kind of race for demographic supremacy as the ‘largest minority’. The groups are presented as adversarial and mutually exclusive: either you are Latino or you are Black. In the face of this widespread and potentially misleading demarcation, Afro-Latinos occupy a crucial place in contemporary racial and ethnic relations in the United States and internationally. They are the group that typically falls between the cracks of prevailing classifications, and yet at the same time stands to serve as the most significant bridge across a growing, and increasingly ominous, social divide. This article seeks to locate Latinos and Latinas of African descent as products of multiple histories and suggests the need for a more integral global vision of both Blackness and Latinidad.

Keywords:

• Afro-Latinas/Afro-Latinos
• Black diversity
• Latino/a diversity
• US Black history
• US Latino/a history
• Afro-Latino culture
• Black Latino culture

Notes

Note

[1] This contribution is a version of the introduction to the forthcoming book, The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture in the United States, edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, published by Duke University Press and scheduled for publication in May 2010.