{"id":19536,"date":"2012-01-04T04:52:26","date_gmt":"2012-01-04T04:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19536"},"modified":"2013-05-27T02:29:55","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T02:29:55","slug":"negra-beautiful-the-unique-challenges-faced-by-afro-latinas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19536","title":{"rendered":"Negra & Beautiful: The Unique Challenges Faced By Afro-Latinas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Negra & Beautiful: The Unique Challenges Faced By Afro-Latinas<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Latina<\/a>
\n2011-11-29<\/p>\n

Damarys Oca\u00f1a<\/a><\/strong>, Freelance Journalist<\/p>\n

The frustrating ironies of being Afro-Latina hit Yuly Marshall with stunning regularity: At work at a Miami hospital, Hispanic patients of the Cuban-born radiology technician usually assume she\u2019s African American, asking her, \u201cWhere did you learn to speak Spanish like that?\u201d and expressing shock\u2014even skepticism\u2014that she\u2019s really Latina. Other times, fellow Latinos will disparage African Americans in front of her with phrases like, \u201cWhat can you expect from negros?\u201d and then turn around and tell her, as if paying her a compliment, \u201cBut you\u2019re not like that. You\u2019re one of us.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nWhen Marshall talks about race issues with African American coworkers, they often tell her she has no idea what it\u2019s really like to be black. Yet a few years ago, when Marshall dated a lighter-skinned black Latino, his parents persuaded him to break it off because of her dark skin. \u201cThey told him to find a white girl so he could adelantar la raza<\/em>,\u201d Marshall says, using a phrase that roughly means to \u2018push the race forward\u2019 by marrying a light-skinned person and producing children lighter than yourself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I think, \u2018When is this going to end?\u2019\u201d says Marshall, 31. \u201cBut I love my skin color. God created me this way, and I\u2019m just as good as any other person.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…\u201cPeople are increasingly identifying as Afro-Latino,\u201d says Miriam Jim\u00e9nez Rom\u00e1n<\/a>, who edited The AfroLatin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States<\/a><\/em>, a collection of essays by Afro-Latino writers that recently won the American Book Award<\/a>. \u201cThey\u2019re aware now that such an identity is a possibility.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nIf it sounds strange that some young Latinas don\u2019t know that it\u2019s okay to be black and Latina, it\u2019s because of the barrage of mixed messages young Afro-Latinas get.
\n\u00a0
\nOf the estimated 11 million enslaved Africans brought to the New World from the late 1400s to the 1860s, most were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean, with only some 645,000 landing in the United States. \u201cSo when you\u2019re talking about blackness, you\u2019re really talking about Latin America,\u201d Jimenez says…<\/p>\n

…Many Latin American countries have de-emphasized race for another reason, says Arlene Davila, Ph.D.<\/a>, a New York University professor of anthropology. \u201cNational identity was supposed to trump racial identity,\u201d she says, supposedly making everyone equal. Black Latinos were made to feel as if trumpeting their race made them less Cuban, for example, though in reality, the political and economic power lay with light-skinned citizens…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Negra & Beautiful: The Unique Challenges Faced By Afro-Latinas Latina 2011-11-29 Damarys Oca\u00f1a, Freelance Journalist The frustrating ironies of being Afro-Latina hit Yuly Marshall with stunning regularity: At work at a Miami hospital, Hispanic patients of the Cuban-born radiology technician usually assume she\u2019s African American, asking her, \u201cWhere did you learn to speak Spanish like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,125,14646,8,394,25],"tags":[9062,9057,9058,9060,9059,9061],"class_list":["post-19536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-women","tag-arlene-davila","tag-damarys-ocana","tag-latina-magazine","tag-miriam-j-roman","tag-miriam-jimenez-roman","tag-miriam-roman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19536\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}