The Minority Support: Move over Miley, Afro-Latinx people have the best of both worlds
What do Zoe Saldana, Kid Cudi and David Ortiz all have in common? That’s right! They’re all Afro-Latinx, but without a quick Google search, would you have known? Across all professions, especially the art realm, Afro-Latinx people aren’t represented, so much so that people have never heard the phrase.
The term Afro-Latinx started as a way to identify those who were Latinx with African heritage. Still, as time continued and the word evolved, those who are biracial have found identification with the term.
The word though became popularized recently as more people have come to identify with it. Why, you may ask? Anti-Blackness in the Latinx community is unshakeable and finds itself in many facets of life, so some distance themselves from their Black roots. It appears when aunts and uncles tell their nieces and nephews to break up with Afro-Latinos to “mejor la raza” (improve the race) or on TV when darker-skinned Latinos play maids and gardeners.
While some aren’t aware of the lack of Afro-Latinx representation, I think it’s time to talk about it, so who better to speak on the issues than Afro-Latinx people at USC?
This aforementioned anti-Blackness proves harmful to Afro-Latinx communities, especially when exploring and solidifying identity. Arantza Peña Popo, a sophomore majoring in journalism who is Afro-Colombian, explained how extreme the nonacceptance of Blackness is in the Latinx community.
“It’s like really bad; like people who were super Black will think they’re white and [it] becomes a rejection of … the past and of things like slavery,” Peña Popo said. “There’s a culture of washing away any kind of hint of African.”
Being both Black and Latinx has left some people feeling as though they don’t fit into either space because they have both of their identities. Since both cultures have their own different traditions and practices, siding with one over the other, socially, ignores a large part of the Afro-Latinx identity. This has been the case for Alayada Young, a sophomore majoring in NGOs and social change who is Nicaraguan with African descent.
“When I go into Latinx spaces, I sometimes feel like I don’t belong, and sometimes when I go into Black spaces, I feel like I don’t belong just because I’m not evidently Latine from appearance,” Young said. “I’m not like the typical Black person. So [I have] a hard time feeling like I belong to both cultures when each space is just predominantly [one] part of me.”
Similarly, there are also occasions where people feel erasure from certain identities because of how people from the Black community or Latinx community perceive them. For Pauline Woodley, a junior majoring in journalism who is half Mexican and half Black, she felt as though she wasn’t enough for either of her identities.
“I guess it makes me question who I was at the end of the day because I don’t speak Spanish perfectly,” Woodley said. “I don’t know as much about my Mexican ancestry as I should. And I know that if I were of a lighter complexion, that wouldn’t really be like a big deal. But because I’m half-black, I almost find myself having to overcompensate for not being as Mexican as I should be. I never grew up in a Black family, so I found myself in these Black spaces where I would second guess myself and who I was. So yeah, I think it just made me more unsure of my identity.”
Looking at the journalism space in particular, Afro-Latinx people, as reporters and in coverage, are few and far between. Since the coverage of Afro-Latinx people is minimal, the closest option is to hear stories about Black and Latinx people as separate entities, which doesn’t represent their full identity. That coverage, too, is largely unsatisfactory because of how many in both groups find it inaccurate.
For Woodley, being aware that there is a demographic of Afro-Latinx people that exist, as well as identifying as such, she tries to bring the community’s stories to the table. Knowing that these stories are largely unacknowledged, she said she uses her identity as an advantage in the newsroom.
“I want my perspective to be known straight off the bat,” Woodley said. “I think that with that comes doing stories that other people wouldn’t do or even pitching stories that other people wouldn’t really like to think of. “I think it definitely unlocks this other layer of creativity because I have this dual perspective of the world.”
For those in the world of makeup, the inherent anti-Blackness in the Latinx community permeates. With Eurocentric beauty standards being the marker of beauty in many Latinx countries, the beauty industry doesn’t reflect those with darker skin. For Young, who visibly presents as a Black woman, displaying darker skin in the beauty industry is crucial.
“I realized that in the makeup artists industry … if you do see Latinx people, it’s mostly white Latinx people,” Young said. “I feel like we need more representation as Afro-Latine people with makeup because makeup is such a beautiful thing and like seeing it on different shades of people is so important.”
What makes it so important is that darker-skinned Afro-Latinx people would recognize and understand that lighter skin and other typically white features don’t make someone more desirable.
The art space is also tough to enter because most people view art without knowing the face or heritage of the artist creating it. The most overt ways artists could disclose their ethnicity to audiences would be declaring it outright or having a Latinx-sounding name.
For Peña Popo, she distinguishes her Afro-Latinx identity by including “Angsty Afro-Latinx Girl” in her Instagram bio. In the past, she has mixed elements of Colombian Indigenous patterns in her artwork.
Expressing identity through art can be done for a multitude of reasons in the creative space, but of those I spoke with, many want to provide representation so that others feel represented in their fields. For this reason, at its core, platforms for Afro-Latinx people are what is important, especially when it’s used to reach out to children.
“I think it’s kind of the same thing, you know, going at the ground level, like not just hiring Afro-Latinos, but also encouraging more Afro-Latinos to study journalism or art and push them into those fields … so they won’t feel alienated,” Peña Popo said.
Afro-Latinx people shouldn’t have to feel the need to hide, or rather disguise, their Blackness or Latinx-ness. Their existence needs to be recognized and celebrated rather than sliced between two worlds like a real-life Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana situation. The more representation they see, the more valid others who see themselves in that space will feel. Hard to hide when, according to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of Latinx people in the United States identify as Afro-Latino, huh?
Disclaimer: Arantza Peña Popo is an opinion comic artist for the Daily Trojan.
Marlize Duncan is a sophomore writing about overlooked USC Black and Indigenous creatives and creatives of color tackling the intersection of their work & minority social issues. Her column, “The Minority Support,” typically runs every other Tuesday.