Neal Wyatt, Editor
Shana M. Higgins, Guest Columnist
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Collections that explore the wealth of a culture are vital to the essence of every library, as they provide opportunities to build connections between students, faculty, librarians, and the community. As witness to the possibilities stands the amazing Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library provides a service to the world with this rich collection and beautifully arranged, accessible Web site. Yet as with the Jazz collections the Schomburg Center includes, the interwoven strands of cultural studies are long, tangled, and complexly interrelated. Shana Higgins’s gathering of resources will help librarians build a collection that provides students, researchers, and lifelong learners a way to contextualize and study the unique cross-cultural aspects of African American and Latino culture.
Higgins is uniquely suited to author this guide. As an instructional services librarian at the University of Redlands Armacost Library, she is responsible for collection development in Latin American studies and race and ethnic studies. In addition to holding an MLS from Indiana University, Bloomington, she also holds a masters degree from their Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.–Editor
Arthur, or Arturo, Schomburg is best known as the bibliophile whose collection of books, prints, and manuscripts on African American art and culture served as the foundation for what is now the New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Less known is that Arturo Schomburg was Puerto Rican. The fact that we rarely encounter Schomburg represented as both African American and Latino (Afro-Latino) is emblematic of the experience of most Afro-Latinos in the United States and underscores this bibliography’s purpose. These resources are intended to illuminate some recent voices seeking to make visible the lived experience of Afro-Latinos across the Americas.
Piri Thomas’s enduring classic memoir of growing up in Spanish Harlem, Down These Mean Streets (New York: Knopf, 1967), provided one of the first descriptions of the experience of being identified as both African American and Latino in United States popular culture. One might consider Bodega Dreams (New York: Vintage Contemporary, 2000) by Ernesto Quiñonez to be an update on Thomas’s classic, insofar as it tells a more current tale of growing up Puerto Rican in East Harlem. Each novel subtly deals with the experience of being both African American and Puerto Rican. It is a part of the mise-en-scene, noticeable if one is attuned. Likewise, the Dominican-born Julia Alvarez characterizes Afro-Latina experience in her book In the Name of Salome (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2000). Of late, Afro-Dominicans have also found some visibility in United States popular culture. On television, characters such as Judy Reyes as nurse Carla Espinosa on Scrubs and BET‘s first Latina host, Julissa Bermudez, both of Dominican descent, claim their blackness and latinidad. Still, the Afro-Latino experience across the Americas remains marginalized.
The term Afro-Latino is itself fraught with ambiguity. According to Africana, the multivolume encyclopedia edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the term refers to “the cultural experience of Spanish-speaking black people in what has become the territory of the United States.”1 For Latin American and Latino studies scholars, such as Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, the term includes those identified as or who self-identify as black in Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean.2 A more popular United States understanding of the term describes the connection between Latino and African American communities in the United States, particularly in relation to Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans on the East Coast, whose cross-cultural contact and productions have been more widely disseminated.3 Despite ambiguities, in the last few years, the Afro-Latino experience has become an increasingly rich area of study within academia.4 The U.S. 2000 Census seems to have served as a catalyst for some in the United States to intensify examination of Afro-Latino cultures.5 For the first time, the Latino population exceeded the African American population in the U.S. Census, clarifying the need to address the heterogeneity within the Latino community and the changing meanings of blackness in the United States.
The principal objective of this column is to educate readers about Afro-Latino experiences across the Americas, and to direct librarians and interested researchers to some current resources. Included are annotated recommendations for books, periodicals, reference materials, films, subscription databases, and Web sites. Print publications and audiovisual materials date from 1995 to 2006. The works listed are in English or include subtitles in English.
Books
This selection of books is limited to items that would enhance a core collection at the university level or at a small college, and several are suitable for public libraries rounding out their popular culture and history collections.
Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2004. (ISBN: 0-19-515232-8).
Reid’s book examines societies with relatively large Afro-American populations and provides relevant background on the ideology of racial egalitarianism, including concepts of blanquamiento and mestizaje.
Duany, Jorge. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 2002 (ISBN: 0-80-785372-0).
In addition to providing an analysis of Puerto Rico’s intensely circular migratory relationship with the United States and a problematization of the concept of nationhood as it relates to Puerto Rico, Duany examines the construction of race and blackness in the Spanish Caribbean and United States as well as the sort of ambivalences that develop when these interact.
Dzidzienyo, Anani, and Suzanne Oboler, eds. Neither Enemies Nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 (ISBN: 1-40-396568-4).
This edited volume collects fifteen essays that explore the interaction of African Americans, Latinos, and Afro-Latinos within particular racialized spaces in the Americas. Several articles deal with the Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican experience in the United States as well as with the Haitian, Ecuadorian, and Columbian experience.
Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 1999 (ISBN: 0-80-784783-6).
Ferrer’s book provides a rich analysis of the tensions between racist and anti-racist rhetoric that was deployed during Cuba’s wars of independence and shaped Cuban nationalism. She demonstrates the persistence of racial hierarchies even within an ideology of racial egalitarianism.
Findlay, Eileen J. S. Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920, American Encounters/Global Interactions. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Pr., 1999 (ISBN: 0-82-232396-6).
By analyzing Puerto Rican antiprostitution campaigns, attempts at reforming marriage laws, and working-class ideas about free love, Findlay exposes the race-related double standards of sexual norms and practices in Puerto Rico between 1870 and 1920, the period that witnessed Puerto Rico’s shift from Spanish to United States colonialism. Findlay’s examination of popular and elite, Puerto Rican and American, and black and white discourses found in both literature and official archives contends that racialized sexual norms and practices were consistently a central component in the construction of social and political orders.
Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives. New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 2000 (ISBN: 0-23-111077-4).
Flores contests and explores the appellation “Latino” as a term that elides multiple identities, particularly those more closely identified as black or of African descent, connecting these explorations to music. He re-establishes ties between the African American and Latino communities through an examination of the birth of hip hop. Forgotten by most, the beginnings of hip hop in New York City were multiethnic in composition.
de la Fuente, Alejandro. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba, Envisioning Cuba. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 2001 (ISBN: 0-80-784922-7).
A Nation for All examines the effects of institutional policies on official discourses of race and on the characteristics of racial inequality in Cuba from 1902 to 1999. Fuente analyzes the framing of race in Cuba through three republics and foreign influences (particularly the United States) on racial constructions and race relations. Moreover, he illuminates some of the contradictory racial discourses of Castro’s socialist Cuba, at once de-emphasizing race while creating the circumstances for fuller inclusion of Afro-Cubans in education and employment.
Greenbaum, Susan D. More Than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa. New World Diaspora series. Gainesville, Fla.: Univ. Pr. of Florida, 2002 (ISBN: 0-81-302747-0).
An important resource, as Greenbaum makes visible the Afro-Cuban-Americans absent in most discussions of Cuban ethnicity in the United States. Her ethnographic study focuses on a specific locality and on a particular organization, the Marti-Maceo Society.
Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. New York: New York Univ. Pr., 2004 (ISBN: 0-81-475818-5).
Negrón-Muntaner makes thought-provoking connections and distinctions between constructions of race on the island of Puerto Rico and in the United States. For example, in the chapter, “Writing on the Wall,” she places Jean-Michel Basquiat within his Afro-Caribbean roots. Her analyses not only highlight the social constructedness of racial thinking but also the foreground diverse constructions of race and the ways in which they are transformed through space, time, and reception.
Pérez-Sarduy, Pedro, and Jean Stubbs, eds. No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today. London: Minority Rights Publ., 1995 (ISBN: 1-87-319485-4).
This collection of essays addresses the experience of black Latin Americans of African ancestry. Activists and scholars from Latin America, North America, and Europe map the veiled history of the black Latin American experience from slavery to contemporary times. The book examines black African experience across the region, including Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, highlighting the ways in which it compares and contrasts in different states.
Rivera, Raquel Z. New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone. New Directions in Latino American Cultures series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 (ISBN: 1-40-396044-5).
Rivera seeks to restore the links between the Puerto Rican and African American communities by centering the birth of hip hop culture in the 1970s. She pays attention to the tensions between the African American and Puerto Rican and Latino communities, signaling the complex and multiple identities available to Afro-Caribbeans in the United States.
Rivero, Yeidy M. Tuning out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television. Console-ing Passions series. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Pr., 2005 (ISBN: 0-82-233543-3).
Rivero explores the political and cultural dynamics that have shaped racial representations in Puerto Rico’s commercial media from the late 1940s to the 1990s. She advances critical discussions about race, ethnicity, and the media in Puerto Rico, countering the discourse of racial egalitarianism that allegedly pervades Puerto Rico’s national culture.
Rogers, Reuel R. Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation: Ethnicity, Exception, or Exit. New York: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2006 (ISBN: 0-52-167640-1).
This book considers the political behavior of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in New York City to answer a familiar but nagging question about American democracy: Does racism still complicate or limit the political integration patterns of racial minorities in the United States? The book concludes that discrimination does interfere with immigrants’ adjustment to American political life. But their strategic options and political choices in the face of this challenge are unexpected ones not anticipated by standard accounts in the political science literature. Thus Rogers offers a fresh theoretical perspective on how foreign-born racial minorities adapt to the American political system.
Thanks for this list of items, it was really helpful! I have a professor looking for Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Latino films, and I hadn’t found these, so these might be useful, thanks!