Introduction: Making Sense, Making Selves. Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean Descent

UPROOTED IRATUS

African grandmother My first cry in life

Why do you not recognize me? Was to protest to injustice

 five years without citizenship

My language is Gongoric. …

My litany is Nazarene. my crime?

My dance is Andalusian. the British Caribbean ancestry

 …

African grandmother five years without citizenship

why do you not recognize me? five

 because my color offended

 Throughout the national territory

 …

 Wounded and confused I left

 The Panamanian cradle

 …

 and in Yankeeland they grant me

 dignity and citizenship

 an irony!

(Wilson, 1991, pp. 18, 29)

Overview

‘The desire (even the need) to migrate is at the heart of the British Caribbean sensibility–whether that migration is in fact or by metaphor’ (Brathwaite, 1993, p. 7). This simple yet profound statement by one of the major figures in Caribbean intellectual thought encapsulates a truth that permeates Caribbean life, literature, history, and cultural practice in the region and beyond. Particularly over the past three decades, documenting the multiple manifestations of this migratory sensibility and determining the nature of its impact on Caribbean people's approaches to self-definition has been the central preoccupation of many scholars, writers, and film-makers with roots in the region. Bonham Richardson's many writings on the topic, including a historical look at Caribbean migration in Franklin Knight and Colin Palmer's The Modern Caribbean (1989), exemplify this trend. The journeying also undergirded the creation and transformation of entire musical genres (hip-hop, reggaetón), political ideologies (Garvey), and careers (Bob Marley).

This history and present has resulted in the persistent presence of a set of questions with which Caribbean intellectuals, artists, and everyday people living abroad engage, often unconsciously: how do I define myself–using what ethnic, racial, national, or cultural referents? What should be my relationship to my nation of residence? To my nation of origin? Do I embrace or reject the paradigmatic identity categories in my new nation? How and what should I teach my children and grandchildren about Caribbean values, traditions, history, and language? How will/do I feel if they reject those teachings, and instead choose to identify themselves wholly with our nation of residence? Why and to whom does it matter if I, as a descendant of Caribbean immigrants, choose to define myself exclusively through my nation of residence? Although, as the work of immigration scholars like Alejandro Portes illustrates, these questions mirror those that permeate the lives of many immigrants, they have a particular weight for British Caribbean people. As we migrate, particularly on this side of the Atlantic, we often find ourselves caught between our own vision of the nature and relative value of race, ethnicity, and nation to our approaches to self-definition and intergenerational transmission of identity paradigms and those of our nations of residence. The prevalence of this tension is borne out in the research and analyses of Philip Kasinitz and Mary Waters (Kasinitz et al., 2006), and Irma Watkins-Owen (1996), among others, and in the writing and lives of the population that is the focus of this special issue–Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent.

The clumsiness that accompanies the attempt to come up with an identifying term for these populations, to formulate a term that adequately reflects their cultural complexity, dramatizes the continuing battle over naming that has so exemplified the trauma suffered by the continent's terrain and people–from the misnaming of the ‘Caribbean’ (Carew, 1978) to the reputed 400 names for various racial mixtures (the underlying semantics of which have been broken down insightfully by Jerome Branche [2006]), to the ongoing challenge of settling on names for people of African descent (Carole Boyce-Davies's 1994 explication of this is particularly helpful), to continuing confusion about whether Guillen's antillano Ltd, Brathwaite's ‘West Indian,’ and Glissant's antillanité all refer to the archipelago as a whole, to particular sub-groups within the region, or something else altogether. At the same time the very persistence of Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent as a distinct presence in the Americas presses for critical introspection on the part of those who have for too long been complacent in the idea of the Latin American nation as the embodiment of a utopian mestizaje (Martí & Fontana, 1970; Appelbaum et al., 2003).

As a plethora of scholars and creative writers have detailed, cultural, ethnic, and racial multiplicity along with physical journeying across national boundaries have been fundamental elements of life in the Caribbean at least since the moment Italian explorer Christopher Columbus bumped into Hispaniola, coming as he did at the behest of Spanish queen Isabela and with a multiracial multinational crew and cargo. Intellectuals from the region, particularly during the second half of the 20th century, sought to analyze and explicate the impact of this history on Caribbean peoples’ psyches. Guyanese scholar Jan Carew argued that it made the people of the region into permanent exiles, even while they resided in the region. Stuart Hall's search for a vocabulary for narrating the complexity of Caribbean identities led him to develop his vision of hybridity and, more specifically, of the dynamic interaction between ‘traces’ of the African, European, and American in the development, articulation, and representation of Caribbean identity.

A number of historians and social scientists have made significant headway in documenting the fact(s) and implications of the move to Latin America. Foremost among these is George Westerman, author of the seminal Los inmigrantes antillanos de Panama (1980). Recent work by Ronald Harpelle in The West Indians of Costa Rica (2002), and the contributors to Oliver Marshall's English-speaking Communities in Latin America (2000) have added new layers and information to the discourse. Pioneering scholarship by political scientist George Priestley (QEPD), historian Roy Bryce-Laporte (Bryce-Laporte & Mortimer, 1983), and literary studies scholar Ian Smart (1984) distinguishes them as being among the very first to bring these communities to the US academy's attention. Priestley's Piel oscura Panamá (Priestley & Barrow, 2003) and ‘The black movement in Panama: a historical and political interpretation 1994–2004’ (Priestley & Barrow, 2008; both co-authored with Alberto Barrow) and his articles on Panamanian British Caribbean political participation–including the well-known ‘Antillean-Panamanians or Afro-Panamanians: political participation and the politics of identity during the Carter–Torrijos treaty negotiations’ (Priestley, 2004)–stand as testaments to the richness of the history and to the talent of the scholar himself. Importantly, literary studies scholars such as Dorothy Mosby (2003) and Rhonda Frederick (2005) have also added layers to the contemporary discourse, along with creative writers from the communities themselves. Among these are Q. Duncan (1996), H. R. Abrahams (2002), P. L. Allen (2003), H. B. Ura del Drago (2003), and Melanie Taylor (2005).

The present issue aims to at once provide new insight into the ways this population negotiates between disparate and, at times, conflicting paradigms and cultural referents in the construction and articulation of identity. Existing between overlapping, linked, and often conflicting histories and realities, Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent have endeavored to carve out spaces for their cross-cultural realities, producing intellectual work, popular cultures, institutions, ways of speaking, and approaches to self-definition and articulation that illuminate the relative importance of their African, British Caribbean, and Latin American roots and routes for their self-concepts. As such, their struggles to balance Old World inheritances with the creations of the New, to make sense of systems of relationality within the ‘New World’ itself, and to envision a future while not forgetting the past can serve as a microcosm of the challenges faced and decisions made by all the peoples of the Atlantic World in the wake of Columbus’ fateful journeys.

The Poetics of Between

Contemporary Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent are the progeny of men and women who journeyed from the Caribbean to Latin America during the late 19th and early–mid 20th centuries to take advantage of the jobs and new opportunities for economic advancement available in their destination sites. Historian Ransford Palmer (1995) identifies the fall of the sugar industry as the catalyst for these migrations. The abolition of slavery led many workers to leave the sugar plantations, and the resulting collapse of the sugar industry resulted in large-scale migrations between and beyond the countries of the region, to Trinidad and British Guiana (see Puri, 2003) as well as to a range of Latin American sites. As a consequence, countries such as Honduras, Columbia, Panama, Nicaragua, Belize, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic are now home to African Diasporic communities that often more closely resemble British Caribbean ones in terms of cultural practices, religion, and approaches to self-definition than they do their mestizo or indigenous compatriots.

The epigraph from the poem ‘Uprooted’ by Panamanian-British Caribbean writer Carlos Guillermo Wilson (Cubena) spotlights the relationship to Africa as an especially crucial challenge for Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent. Despite being aware of the ‘foreign’ (non-African) nature of his tongue, litany, and dance, the poem's speaker is baffled that (Grand) Mother Africa cannot recognize him as her descendant (see quotation above). He still feels a connection to her, and wants her to see him. Unfortunately his African grandmother either cannot or will not recognize him, leaving him feeling alienated. The plaintive tone of the poem, reinforced by the repetition of ‘African grandmother/why do you not recognize me?’, marks the speaker as a ‘poor thing’ pleading for acknowledgement and acceptance. At the same time, the diction and tone of the lines in which he lists his own qualities along with the positioning of the line breaks (i.e. after each quality) suggests that he, too, sees himself as something of a curious creature. He catalogs his characteristics as if he were someone spying a strange object through a microscope: Gongoric tongue, Nazarene litany, and Andalusian dance. He still has an interest in and sense of connection to Africa, but is trying to figure out the meaning of all these ‘foreign’ qualities for that relationship.

In the poem ‘Iratus’ the speaker expresses his profound anger about being rejected by the nation through which he has come to define himself–his ‘cradle’, because of his Blackness and his Caribbean ancestry. For him, neither his race nor his ethnicity have any bearing on his right or desire to claim citizenship in his Latin American nation. As in ‘Uprooted’, the diction conveys the image of a hurt and rejected soul seeking connection and recognition: ‘wounded and confused’. These poetic dramatizations, although most certainly reflective of a single individual's viewpoint, indicate just how significant and intense the negotiations of multiple cultural referents and affinities can become, and serve to explain why an individual might choose to simply embrace and define him/herself through only one aspect of his/her background instead of trying to juggle.

Between Academic Fields

Furthermore, because these populations implicitly interrogate the conventional boundaries of Latino Studies, Latin American Studies, and African American Studies, analyses such as the ones in this issue help us to think critically about the future structure and orientation of these fields. As the products of multiple colonial mother-countries (England and Spain), multiple national imaginaries (e.g. Panama, the United States, Barbados), and multiple popular cultures and political movements (e.g. Rastafarian, hip-hop, US civil rights), Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent differ markedly from other communities such as US African Americans and Black Britons that have been more frequently the subject of scholarly discourse. They represent, therefore, a novel departure point for rethinking the meanings of established theoretical and conceptual Black Studies frameworks such as the Diaspora (Hall, 1990; Edwards, 2003), the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993), the search for Africanisms (Price & Mintz, 1992), as well as Latin American Studies and Latino Studies, such as the repeating island (Benitez-Rojo), brincando el charco (Muntaner, 1994), transculturation (Ortiz & Santi, 2002), and mestizaje (Martí & Fontana, 1970)–in addition to (British) Caribbean Studies and post-colonial studies concepts like creolization, and ‘nation language’ (Brathwaite 1993), as well as for positing new ones.

The currency that ‘Hemispheric American Studies’ enjoys in contemporary humanities discourse is unmistakable. Over the past several years in particular, it has become increasingly prominent on the programs of key scholarly organizations, including the American Studies Association. It has been further bolstered by monographs, such as Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Literature (2001) and Gretchen Murphy's Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of US Empire (2005), edited compilations such as the special issue of American Literary History on Hemisphere and Nation edited by Robert S. Levine and Caroline Levander (Levander & Levine, 2006), and the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on the Transamerican Imaginary edited by Ramón Saldivar and Paula Moya (Moya & Saldivar, 2003).

The story has not been wholly positive, however. Unexpected consequences threaten the approach's potential efficacy, impact, and longevity. For instance, African American Studies has, too often, been perceived by many within and without the ‘new’ American Studies as wholly separate from this newly (re)generated inter-American approach. There is a very real fear among many within this largely US-centered subfield, and one that often comes to the fore in debates over hiring, that the study of US African Americans will be forgotten, pushed aside, or forced to take a back seat to a focus on Latinos, Latin Americans (and non-US Blacks), and that they, therefore, must defend it. African Routes, Caribbean Routes, Latino Lives argues that our understanding of the hemisphere can truly be advanced only if we are more attentive to the nuances and complexities of interaction (whether collaboration, conflict, or some combination) than we are to explicating discrete instances/groups. This special issue foregrounds the connections and highlights overlapping themes between the histories, cultures, literatures, and identities of the populations created/touched by Columbus’ voyage to the ‘New World’, illustrating the limitations of these divisions, and positing innovative disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies for thinking beyond them.

The perception of a threat to African American Studies is indicative of a larger concern about the danger that discursive and methodological globalization poses to (US) Ethnic Studies more generally. In fact, a whole series of fora dedicated to this issue were organized at the 2006 Modern Language Association convention. At the same time, Latin American Studies has for too long been plagued by an aversion to studies of Afro-Latin America that foreground race and that are not about music or dance as well as by the idea that Latinos (even those of primarily African descent) are a separate group from African Americans. Change is on the horizon. The recent publication of George Reid Andrews's Afro-Latin America (2004) and Torres and Whitten's two-volume Blackness in Latin America (1998a, 1998b), along with earlier work by Richard Jackson (1997, 1998), Jean Stubbs and Pedro Perez Sarduy (2000), among others, and the increasing presence of Afro-Latino work on the Latin American Studies Association conference programs, augurs this progress.

Also not to be forgotten is that preceding the recent rise of Hemispheric American Studies was the development of Post-colonial Studies, US Ethnic Studies, and Diaspora Studies as viable interpretive frameworks. So this ‘new’ ‘hot’ field is at once colliding with, challenging, and connecting to the commonplaces that these various ‘studies’ have established. Especially important is the fact that each posits its own distinctive geography, differentiating it from the other areas while also nurturing an overvaluation of that distinctiveness and a hesitance to explore connections. One result that is particularly relevant for this special issue is the separation of areas that could logically and productively be explored in an integrative fashion, both because of material historical connections and similarities in the issues of interest to scholars working in them. So, for example, work on the British Caribbean comes to be treated primarily as part of post-colonial studies whereas research on US Blacks is designated African American Studies, and scholarship on Latinos or Latin Americans is located in US Ethnic Studies or Latin American Studies respectively (see Ashcroft et al., 2006).

Between African Americans and Latinos

The present special issue is also driven by developments in the US public sphere that implicitly or explicitly pit Latinos against US African Americans (Mindiola et al., 2002; Vaca, 2004). By spotlighting communities that blur the line between the two populations, it provides alternative paradigms for defining and interpreting the relationships between ‘Latinos’ and ‘Blacks.’ The recurring discussion in the US media of the fact that Latinos are or will become the largest minority in the United States, positions Latinos and US African Americans as competitors. Similarly, the argument that too many descendants of recent African immigrants and British Caribbean people were getting into the top universities, taking slots that should go to African Americans, relies on a logic of comparison and competition. The title of the article ‘Top colleges take more blacks, but which ones?’ (Rimer & Arenson, 2004) reinforces the complexities of naming–what/who is Black?–and of demarcating the boundaries of community–the implication that there are different Blacks and that it matters which ones are being admitted. Major African American intellectuals and leaders like Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Lani Guinier entered the fray, registering their concern about the disproportionate presence of Black children of Black immigrants (New York Times, 24 June 2004, p. A1).

As Stephen Steinberg's The Ethnic Myth (1989) elucidates, particularly in its analysis of the hierarchy between the ‘good’ blacks (i.e. British Caribbeans) and the ‘bad’ blacks (i.e. US African Americans) in the United States, race and ethnicity are not only identity categories, but also tools used by states to mete out rewards or punishments. In the case of Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent, this multi-layered reality is clearly evident in their approaches to self-definition and representation, as well as their marginalization in their home nations. Carlos Guillermo Wilson's poem ‘Iratus’ encapsulates this point clearly. It bemoans the 1941 Panamanian constitution's denial of citizenship to Panamanian-born children of British Caribbean immigrants. In the process of doing so, the poem indexes a relationship to the United States that diverges from the anger about the US nation's rejection and hypocrisy, and the need to constantly remind those in power of their (right to) citizenship so prevalent in writing and thought by and on African Americans and Latinos more generally. In so doing, it illuminates one of the many complex positionalities that can distinguish Afro-Latinos and Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent from others in these broader racial and ethnic communities, others with whom, at a first glance, they would be automatically equated, The point here is not that all Afro-Latin Americans of British Caribbean descent love the United States, but rather that their relationship to both their Latin American nations of origin and the United States cannot easily be understood solely through existing paradigms created for/by these larger ethnoracial categories. The present special issue explores their decisions about identity as evidence of a negotiation with multiple forces, including utopian Latin American national mythologies, Afrocentrism and Black nationalism, racism, nostalgia, the need for revisionist (hi)story-telling, and consumer capitalism.

Issue Contents

The Articles section features four scholarly essays. The first, ‘Are Panamanians of Caribbean ancestry an endangered species?’ by Sonja Stephenson Watson, delves into the writing of Panamanian thinkers Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Gerardo Maloney and Carlos Russell. She examines the ways they navigate between the West Indies, Panama and Africa, arguing that they challenge dominant discourses of homogeneity and whiteness in favor of a black one that promotes a Caribbean heritage through a consciously racialized discourse.

The second article, Darcie Vandegrift's essay ‘First time days and the development life’, investigates the memory-making processes undertaken by Afro-Costa Ricans in Puerto Viejo. She argues that narrative memory creates an inheritance of understandings, emotion, and analysis through which to understand the here and now (‘now days’), ‘demonstrating that nostalgia is not an elite act to be easily dismissed, but rather an important diagnostic tool for actors to critique the racial inequalities generated by global restructuring’.

The third article, ‘Their modernity matters too’ by Francio Guadaloupe, studies the approaches to racial and ethnic differentiation embedded within the life histories of the Richardson sisters, three British Caribbean descended women born in the Dominican Republic, contending that they deconstruct the naturalization of race while recognizing the importance of combating racism and global capitalist exploitation. They provide models for seeing beyond race and recognizing the power that consumer capitalism has had in shaping the Caribbean and its Diaspora.

The fourth article, Katherine Zien's ‘Toward a pedagogy of redress’, explores the question of how performance analysis methodologies can enrich our understanding of the pedagogical and political dimensions of revisionist historiography that seeks to compile and narrate the history of a marginalized community, and reintroduce that story into the national memory. Centering on the play De/From Barbados a/to Panamá, authored by Melva Lowe de Goodin (1999), the article illuminates the extent to which the play is both a pedagogical tool and an esthetic product, ‘performatively constructing’ the recollections it proposes to represent.

The Perspectives section opens with an essay by Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román which examines the burgeoning field of Afro-Latino Studies. Afro-Latinos, they argue, 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 essay 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.

The Perspectives section then goes on to present poetry, life history, and photographs. In particular, it includes recent unpublished poetry by pioneering Panamanian British Caribbean poet and Civil Rights organizer Dr Carlos Russell, this guest editor's life history interview with San Andrés/Colombian activist Emiliana Bernard Stephenson, and photographs from Fulbright scholar Rose Marie Cromwell's ‘Afro-Antillean Sentiment’ exhibit.

Review essays by Mayra Santos Febres, on Juan Flores’ The Diaspora Strikes Back, and by Violeta Donawa, on George Reid Andrews’ Afro-Latin America 1800–2000, constitute the final section, rounding out the issue.

Notes

Note

I am particularly grateful to Destiny O. Birdsong and J.A. Smith, as well as to Peter Wade and Rhoda Reddock, for their steadfastness and support as I worked to compile this issue.